You know that expression: Physician, heal thyself?  Or, the cobbler’s children have no shoes?  Well, this organizer’s garage needed a professional and it needed it quickly!

I bought a new car to replace my aging Passat wagon.  Most women my age are celebrating empty nests and trading in the van or SUV for something small and sporty.  Not me.  I went bigger — I got a minivan! I compete with my dog in agility and obedience.  The more I train and compete, the more equipment I need.

Everything fit in the new van (Organizing the Minivan), the problem was that the new van didn’t fit in the garage. It was too long.

I did what any organizer would do – I drew a floor plan with the garage dimensions and the van’s specifications.  I played around with it until I found a way to angle the van so it would fit.

The problem was that my stuff was jammed up parallel to the walls. I hadn’t gone through it for years and didn’t really know what I had. Sound familiar? Not only did I have to re-arrange everything into the corners, I needed to do a wholesale purge and re-organization.  Complicating the issue is that the garage floor slopes down from the wall before it levels out, making it hard to store things flush to the wall.

I went back to the floor plan, figured out where the limit lines were, then drew them on the garage floor with contractor’s paint.  I bought a sheet of ¾” plywood cut to my specifications and a couple of 2x4s to use as supports so I could level out the floor next to the walls.

Then the hard work of purging what I no longer needed began.  Going through most of the accumulated junk was easy and actually liberating. The difficulty was the memorabilia.  I got bogged down in memories, and stymied by emotion.  I understand why my clients need dispassionate guidance. I had to put on my objective professional hat in order to wade through sentimentality and make decisions.

The whole job took about two days – one day for thinking and planning and a second day for execution.  Job complete!

Epilog:  While the van fits in the garage on paper, it was too difficult to jockey it into the exact spot every time.  About 3 inches of the back fender corner never cleared the electric eye line of sight. But I did get a newly re-organized garage in the process!