Hi.
I'm Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today is
a windy, blustery Spring day.
I'm out here in my garage and I want to talk to you about a common problem that I see in
garages and sometimes in basements.
And that's what I call "boneless spaces.
" They have no skeleton, there's no infrastructure [POP] of shelving or cabinets or anything
to store items and, therefore, they end up around the periphery of the room, in stacks,
and then they eventually creep into the middle of the space.
And if we're talking about a garage, very quickly that means that you cannot park your
car there.
So I have a one-car garage in my new house here and I really need [POP] to park my car
in it.
So I have a problem with, you know, no infrastructure.
And this is how I solved it.
Overhead racks.
This is one of the most elegant, brilliant, simple solutions I've ever found for a quick
turn-around in a garage.
I've done this with so many client projects, magazine projects, and my friends at saferacks.com
are the ones who helped me out with this and have always helped me with my other projects
too.
And I love their storage units because they're super strong and better, they have dealers
all over the country, so you can find one on their web site, and then they will help
you figure out the right configuration of shelving and they will install it, which is
super important.
So each of these racks holds 600 pounds of stuff.
And I certainly don't want to be the one installing that if I'm going to have 600 pounds of stuff
hanging over my car.
So that's very important to me.
So I wanted you to see the before pictures here in my little one-car garage, and now
the after pictures.
So what I got are two 4 X 8 units -- and they have different sizes so you can get whatever
works for your garage -- but each of these with a two-foot drop from the ceiling becomes
64 cubic feet of storage space.
So because I have two, I have 128 cubic feet of storage space in this little garage that's
added on, up above, that's not in my way.
And I did a little price comparison.
If you go to a storage unit facility and you get one of the smallest units, which is like
5 X 5, so it's about 200 cubic feet, [POP], just a little bit more, you're going to spend
over $700 a year, depending on where you live, and this just pays for itself right away,
not to mention the convenience of having all your stuff right here at your own house with
the security issues and things being hauled around.
It's so much better to have it all right here.
So I learned a few things from doing this, so I wanted to let you know what I learned.
First of all, your installer probably knows this, but when you're installing these you
want to think about who is the tallest member of your household, make sure you measure how
tall these racks are going to be when they assign the drop from the ceiling and figure
that out, because you want the tallest person in your family to be able to walk under these
without having to duck.
Very important when you're taking out the garbage and stuff like that.
So the next thing I learned is that you might want to put labels on the bottom of your boxes,
because there is a grid here and you can actually see up underneath through the grid.
So it could be helpful for you to see the labels on the bottom, and that's not something
you typically would do, so it's kind of a neat idea.
Also, if you're worried about the stability of some of the stacks that you have here,
you can actually stretch a bungee cord across the sides and they have places easily that
you can hook the bungees on to.
And that can give you a little bit more, you know, flexibility and stability.
And the other thing that I really like is that you can get these little accessory hooks
and you can hang ladders and bikes and extension cords, like you see here, and do a lot with
this grid that's hanging, you know, things can hang off the bottom of this grid.
So there's a lot you can do with these overhead racks.
It sure does free up the space and now I can park my car in here, I've got holiday decorations
and things way up out of the way but easy for me to reach, and it's a really elegant
solution.
If you want to find out more, you can go see my friends at saferacks.com, and we will see
you next time.
May you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.