It doesn’t matter if your tools are in your craft room, or in your shed. Maybe you like to work old-school in your garage, or maybe you’re one of those fortunate individuals who have an entire room dedicated to working with your hands. Whatever the case may be, any true handyman has a ton of tools lying about. Therein lies the problem essentially.
Namely, we all know how addictive it is to just get one more tool, one more piece of equipment. These then pile up, and after a time it’s impossible to find that one thing you need. Not to mention how much money you spend on buying new stuff, and then finding out you hadn’t really lost that screwdriver, it was just blocked underneath a mound of clutter. What you need is to organize.
Organizing your tools is a lot harder than it sounds. If it were easy, everybody would have a nicely set up shed or workbench. For this reason, we have taken the liberty of writing up a nice little guide that is supposed to help you get your gear in order. Read on to find out the best ways to organize your tools.
Make a plan
What you first want to do is figure out what “organized” means to you. How do you want things to look like, where do you want things to be? You need to have an end goal in mind if you want to have an organized workspace.
So, we have a couple of suggestions. Label your drawers, nails, sections, tables, hangers… You want to think as little as possible, you want to instantly know where to place your favourite tool once you’re done with it. You can even draw out outline for your tools on your wall, just for that added visual simplification.
Your items should be organized logically. Think what is the most appropriate place for certain items and tools, and try to be as efficient with your space as possible. Should you hang this item on the wall, or is it better if you put it in a drawer? Maybe putting it on the shelf is better… Try to group similar items logically, without actually mixing them up.
Declutter
However, before you even begin organizing everything, labelling things, and drawing out outlines, you want to clean everything up. You need to completely clean out and clean up your workspace at first. Find the time, or chunks of time (more on that later) and get to work. Get rid of old manuals, throw out empty glue bottles, boxes, magazines…
You also want to set up a day in the month (or week, deepening on your preferences) where you will do a regular total clean-up of your workspace. Don’t worry, if you do this on a regular basis, you won’t actually have that much work to do anyway. If you let things pile up, however, then you’ll get into trouble.
Get the right gear
Yes, yes, more equipment, we know. But there is some equipment that can help you get organized a bit better. Certain items and systems make it much easier to get all your gear in one place, and may even have certain dedication sections that do the thinking from you. Instead of obsessing and planning where certain things can go, with clearly designated slots you won’t have to think. For example, getting a good maintenance trolley can be a lifesaver.
If you’re wary about investing even more money into even more gear, know that this is an investment in your work or hobby. It will save you a lot of time in the long run and, as we’ve already mentioned, may save you from buying a duplicate piece of equipment that you thought you lost.
Getting the right storage units, cupboards, desks, shelves – all of these can help you out a lot when trying to organize things. Get some rails, a complete cabinet, or a specialised workbench.
Perfect is the enemy of good
Know that you will never have a perfectly organized work station, and you shouldn’t aim for something like that either. If you try to keep things in perfect order at all times, you’re going to kill your love for the work. The other option is that this will demotivate you from ever truly cleaning things up. Indeed, if it can’t be perfectly tidy, why even bother organizing things at all?
What you want to aim at is a station that is in functional order, one where there may be some things lying around, but not chaos that makes your work suffer. Also, if you only have 15 minutes to clean and fix everything up, but you need at least an hour to do so properly, just do the 15 minutes. This will stop things from getting worse, and will make life easier next time around. So whenever you get the chance, try to organize things as much as you can, and be happy with what you can do at any given moment.
Conclusion
Organizing your tools makes life much easier. It makes you a more efficient handyman, and can save you some money in the long run. No need to constantly lose and find equipment that you already bought a replacement for. If you stay diligent and thorough, you can get a nice workspace you won’t dread to come into.
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