One of the best things you can have in your yard is a good garden shed. There are a lot of portable buildings available these days that you can easily have installed on your property, like carports or even a screened in porch. But a garden shed or a storage shed are some of the easiest to set up and most useful in the long run. If you haven’t got one, or if you have one but aren’t making good use of it, read on for some helpful tips for organizing your shed.

• You need to commit to the idea of organization. If your garden shed is disorganized, you can easily waste ten minutes looking for a rake, or exhaust yourself before the project even begins by having to move a lot of heavy things around to get at the stuff you actually need. Understand that organizing will take some time, but that it will save you even more time in the long run.
• Take care of your tools with long handles, first. Once these things are out the way, you can see better to deal with everything else. You can easily find tool hangers at a hardware store, so get one and free up space in the garden shed by putting it on the back of the door. All your tools with long handles go here.
• Go ahead and invest in some good shelving. If your garden shed doesn’t already have some shelves, get some. Open metal shelves aren’t very expensive, they let limited light through more easily, and they are typically adjustable. That way you can fit tall things on one shelf while still making space for smaller things on a narrow shelf elsewhere.
• Takes a lesson from your kitchen storage. A lot of people these days use a magnetic strip to hold up metal kitchen implements that they use often, like knives and spatulas. You can do the same things in storage sheds. Any metal gardening gear, like a trowel, will fit neatly up there. Put the bar at eye level where it’ll be quick to notice and grab whatever tool you need for the job at hand.
• Think creatively about items from other parts of the house. You can take inspiration from the kitchen; you can also take inspiration from the bathroom. If you have anything that easily gets tangled, get an inexpensive toilet paper holder and hang it on its side in the garden shed. You can use it to hold twine or rope, long wire, or anything else that can loop around. Then you’ll never spend a wasted hour finding and de-tangling these items again.
• Organize things on your shelf with baskets and bins. Even if you have good shelving, you can still easily find yourself in a bind trying to get things out as the shelves fill up. Get some wire mesh bins or some simple baskets and put tools and other items in places where you can see them, but where they can remain organized and in place.

Your garden shed can be a great place, and if you don’t already have one you don’t know what your missing. Get a good one that fits your yard, and then make the most of it by organizing your tools, machines, and other items in a way that saves you time and inspires you to spend some time in the yard.