Clean Out Your Garage Day: Time to Get Organized!

With the changing of the seasons comes time for quarterly maintenance and household organization. September 8th marked National Clean Out Your Garage Day, an initiative to get garages across the nation cleaned and prepped for winter. September may have passed, but there’s still plenty of time to get your digs in order before cold weather and holiday guests descend! I recently received a complimentary “Clean Our Your Garage” Kit courtesy The Lehigh Group, ACE Hardware and Quickie so that I could do just that. Now, although I may be the proud owner of a brand new driveway, I do not yet have a garage. However, Grandma does, so we packed up the kit and headed over to her garage!

Jai said I should use this picture of him pulling a face while cleaning the garage, so here you go. 😉 In his hands are both a ACE Multi-Surface Pushbroom and a Quickie 2-in-1 Squeegee Pushbroom. Both of these brooms turned out to be very helpful for cleaning out Grandma’s garage!

I used the ACE broom to get around corners, since its size allowed it to get into smaller spaces. I then used the Quickie broom, which is a bit larger, to sweep the middle of the garage and cover more ground. It worked nicely and I was able to get it pretty well swept out – although I didn’t really get it deep-cleaned, as Grandma insisted I wrap up the cleaning so that I wouldn’t hurt my knees! She’s always looking out for me!

The Quickie pushbroom also has a squeegee built-in, which would be really helpful for wet messes. I think these are going to be great for all kinds of applications, especially the next time we have a big construction project. The only minor issue we had that was that the ACE broom was challenging to assemble – it had a plastic cap on the broom handle that needed to be removed prior to assembly, although the instructions didn’t mention it and it was very difficult to pry off. We finally used pliers and were able to free it and get the broom put together!

Here’s her garage after I was done sweeping – so what do you think? I cropped out a pile of firewood and her exercise bike, since Grandma was a little concerned about people on the Internet thinking her house was messy. I told her that I am an expert at cropping out household clutter! 😉

We also received a few other items that are ideal for both garage organization and other projects, too. Pictured above are the Crawford 16″ Adjustable Storage Organizer and Sliding Spring Grip Organizer, which we are going to install in our laundry room in the coming months after we paint it. I can’t tell you how awesome this will be, as our laundry room is tiny and I’m always dealing with brooms and mops falling out of the corner and just generally being annoying. This will help us utilize that space much better!

Finally, we received a pack of Lysol Multi-Purpose Scrubber Sponges. These are designed for heavy-duty outdoor projects, but you know what? These have been awesome on our dishes! Yes, we still do all our dishes by hand – no dishwasher here – and these sponges are perfect. They’re heavy duty and durable, so they don’t fall apart; and they also don’t get dirt and grime stuck to them the way a lot of sponges do. (If you do dishes by hand, then you know what I’m talking about! Bleurgh!!)

Whether you’re planning to clean up your garage or organize other places, you can check out your local ACE Hardware Store to find some of these products and more. So tell me, readers: Does your garage need some help?