Use An Over-The-Door Pocket Organizer To Add Budget-Friendly Garage Storage

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While any area of the home can fall prey to the rule of entropy, the garage may succumb faster than others. The lack of air conditioning, dirty floors, and presence of creepy bugs can make it easy to give up on your weekend goals of optimizing your garage's organization and storage. If this sounds like your plight but you're ready for a more functional garage and don't want to spend a fortune, there's a budget-friendly find that will level up your garage: over-the-door pocket organizers.

Traditionally marketed as a way to organize your footwear, over-the-door organizers have grown in popularity as a way to keep your home clutter-free. In the garage, you can hang an over-the-door organizer on the backside of the door, which gives you numerous pocket slots for stashing tools, as well as odds and ends that lack a place to go. The real beauty of this storage solution is the immediate gratification it offers — it should take next to no time to hang the organizer, plus whatever time is needed to load it up. Additionally, the vertical layout means it won't occupy precious square footage. It also is quite easy to track down a good organizer, with retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target carrying various models. Once installed, you can use the over-the-door organizer to hold paintbrushes and wooden stir sticks, hammers, screwdrivers, rolls of duct tape, tubes of caulk, and even boxes of nails or screws.

In order to guarantee your new organizer does what you're hoping it will, appropriate planning is necessary. Double-check the over-the-door hooks will fit in the space between the top of the door and door frame. As you're sifting through the many available models, it could also be useful to select ones with mesh or plastic see-through pockets, which will allow you to easily identify the contents, making retrieving items and putting them away a more seamless process. The Gorilla Grip Over-the-Door Shoe Organizer ($14.99 on Amazon) could be a worthwhile contender, with a 4.6-star average across nearly 35,000 reviews. Fitted with large, see-through pockets, this organizer is praised by buyers as being a functional find. One five-star Amazon review stated, "It's perfect! I put it on the back of our walk-in garage door. It holds all my small garden hand tools and small supplies."

To prevent the pocket organizer from becoming a jumbled mess, it's wise to store similar items together in a single pocket: one for screwdrivers, gardening gloves, and tape measures, for example. Placing commonly used items in the pockets halfway up the door for users of average height, while less-frequently-required tools and accessories can be stored in the top tier of slots. If you like to be particularly organized or share your items with a partner, using a label maker to mark the contents on each pocket is a worthwhile endeavor. Before filling up your new organizer, check out our clever tips to help declutter and organize your garage tool kit like a pro.