Almost every day I take my Golden Retriever, Alton, for a walk, and inevitably I pass by at least one house that has their garage door open. I’m not really proud to admit this, but I can’t help but look inside. I don’t go up driveways or invasively invade privacy (they left their door open after all). I just scan the contents quickly as Alton and I go by.

As a person who strives to live an organized life and who flirts with minimalism, I can’t hep but be curious about how people are filling )(or not filling+) the roughly 400 square feet of space that is a part of their home. Most garages, I would say at least half, are used purely as storage spaces. Here in California the climate is such that parking your car in the garage isn’t a neccessitiy. Drew and I don’t park our cars in our garage.

So that leaves two categories remaining, really. Non-car garages that are well organized. And non-car garages that are just piles and piles of hot mess. Tidy garages utilize storage shelving, wall to wall cabinets, tool organizers and vertical storage solutions like bike racks, etc. The hot messes are just a mass of stuff in what seems to be very random chaos, stacked high, sometimes in unmarked boxes, with barely a square inch of floor to be seen, to say anything of a discernable walking path.