If the cozy life is new to you, it means cultivating a life of peace, joy, and understanding that brings together purposeful living, simple living, and faithful living. I explain it here: Creating a Cozy Life.

The next step in our cozy life reset was purging the garage. We knew this needed to be done, but it was continually moved down the to-do list for other more pressing tasks. To give you an idea of what we were dealing with, we have a two-car garage and have no problem getting two cars in the garage. So it wasn’t like it was overflowing with so much stuff we had to leave the cars parked in the driveway. But there was still too much stuff on the shelves, in the corners, and on the floor along the walls that truly needed to go.

Motivation for This Garage Purge

Several days before Caroline’s graduation party, rain showed up in the forecast for the designated day. Our plan was to have the food in the house and tables set up on the decks in the backyard. Now that the possibility of rain was real, we had to implement a back-up plan.

This meant we might have to hold the party in the garage.

This is not unheard of in the Midwest. I’ve been to many graduation open houses that were set up in the garage. However, if we had to do this then we had some serious work to do.

How to Quickly Purge the Garage

Here is what we did in our garage purge.

• Pull everything out of the garage into the driveway. Sweep and clean off all the shelves and floor.
• Systematically evaluate every single item before you allow it back in the garage.
• Throw away all of the items that truly aren’t worth saving including things like extras, just-in-case, and/or this-is-still-too-good-to-just-throw-away items.
• Spray off with the hose and/or hand clean every item allowed back in the garage
• If necessary, purchase a couple of new storage tubs to replace the older ones and make things look tidy and uniform.

By the time we were done, we had enough junk to load our Equinox and paid $40 to leave it at the dump.

Our purge included so many items, supplies, etc. we had held onto that were “too good to throw away but not good enough to donate.”

Does that sound familiar to anyone else?

A Tidy Garage

In the end, we did not need to have the party in the garage. The weather was gorgeous and we were so thankful. But the party was the impetus to get us to tackle this important project once and for all. The only thing left to do is cleaning out David’s stand-alone workbench. Our garage is noticeably emptier and only contains truly useful things.

Do you have a garage that needs purging? If so, I hope you find encouragement and motivation from our experience to do the same thing.