Tips for Cleaning Outdoor Spaces
Why is the laundry basket in the outdoor storage room?
Be honest; how many times have you found things in random places where they don’t belong?
After discovering the laundry basket along with a few other odd items, I decided it was time to clean up and reorganize my outdoor storage space. (Yes, even professional organizers can get disorganized from time to time.)
For someone with ADHD that loves the outdoors, I get distracted sometimes, (squirrel), but can easily jump back in right where I was.
Our outdoor storage room has three categories: Gardening, Household, and Pool Toys.
I started with the biggest hurdle ⎻ Gardening
We live on six acres with a large garden area. And large gardens require maintenance so we have a lot of chemicals and tools.
We have a variety of garden chemicals including plant food and fertilizer, insect repellent and weed killer, none of which are organic. Don’t come at me. To get these organized I used open bins to contain the bottles divided by subcategory, because it helps prevent messes if there are spills.
Garden tools were divided into pruners, forks, shovels and then odds and ends I only have 1 of. These were put into 6 quart bins, which are cheap, easy and readily available. Larger tools like watering cans, rakes, and large shovels were hung on a pegboard, that my handy husband installed.
Moving on to household items. We keep filters, lightbulbs for the garage area, and sliders for moving furniture in our outdoor storage. These items were placed on the top shelf in bins to protect them; and since they aren’t used as often we don’t need to reach for them frequently.
My kids are all grown up so the pool toys were the easiest to get organized, because they mainly consist of water guns now. They get pulled out a few times between Easter and Fall so they went on the pegboard for easy access.
Make sure to label everything for ease of retrieval!
To organize your own outdoor space use the C.H.A.O.S method:
Categorize - Put Like Items together.
Helpful or Hurtful - Is this something you use or is it just sitting there like a bag of rocks
Action - Are you keeping it, donating it, or trashing it? Those are your three options.
Organize - Now that you’ve purged your items, it’s time to organize. Put like items together and put them away in the space, keeping in mind the frequency of use
Simplify - Label, Label, Label. This helps you see what you have at a glance.