10 things you should never store in your garage
We’re always telling you about the great things you can do with your garage space, like safely storing power tools, preparing it for an electric car, and even turning it into a home office. What we don’t often talk about are the things you shouldn’t do with a garage.
In this blog post, we cover 10 things that we would never recommend storing in your garage - a few of them might even surprise you!
- Pet food
Pet food often comes in hefty sacks or big, bulk packages, and having to find somewhere to put this inside the house can be a real pain. However, storing pet food in the garage puts your home at higher risk of attracting hungry pests and vermin.
- Camping equipment
Storing things like tents and sleeping bags in a garage seems like a sensible thing to do but in actual fact, you’ll probably end up with damaged fabric and rusty metal due to the dampness and cold. Plus, sleeping bags provide an appealing place to nest for unwanted critters.
- Paint
This one might come as a bit of a shock but contrary to popular belief, stashing paint way into your garage is not a handy storage hack. In fact, storing paint in a garage is a pretty bad idea because extreme temperatures can actually damage the paint’s formula irreparably.
- Books
Garages can be super humid places, especially when the weather gets warmer and this kind of environment is bad news for books. Tidying books away into your garage to save space in your home can be tempting but you’ll only end up with a moldy old library.
- Photographs
The extreme temperatures and humidity that come hand-in-hand with every typical garage space can damage photographs beyond repair. So the last thing you want to do is go store all of your most precious memories in the garage.
- Electronic items
If you have things like spare televisions, cameras, old laptops or DVD players you don’t use anymore, the garage seems like the perfect place to keep them. However, humidity and extreme temperatures can cause permanent damage to electrical goods. Plus, it’s a good idea to keep items like this somewhere completely secure.
- Important documents
In the same way the humidity and dampness of a garage can damage things like books and photographs, it can also destroy paper and cardboard. So if you’ve got boxes of important documents and paperwork that you need to keep, store them elsewhere.
- Clothes
During the change of seasons, some people like to store their clothes in the garage to save space in drawers and wardrobes indoors. However, keeping clothes in a garage puts them at risk of damage from things like dust mites, pests, and moths, as well as dampness and mold. Instead, vacuum pack the clothes and keep them under the bed or in your attic.
- Propane tanks
Propane tanks are something people like to have to hand when using gas-powered BBQs. Storing them in the garage is extremely dangerous as the flammable gas can leak and easily catch fire. For this reason, it’s important to store propane tanks in well-ventilated spaces, rather than in your garage.
- Firewood
Storing firewood in your garage poses a few problems. Firstly, it can catch fire easily when dry, which is great when you want to cozy up in front of the fire but not so great when it’s out of your control. Firewood is also another pest magnet so make sure to store it somewhere a good few yards away from your home - at the bottom of your garden perhaps.
Follow this guidance and you’ll successfully optimize the use of your garage space.