10 Effective Tips for Keeping Your Workshop Organized (With Pictures)

A disorganized workshop can drastically impede your ability to work, slowing down every project and dragging them out to unreasonable lengths. Not to mention the frustration you experience every time you’re searching around for that darn tool you just had a second ago! Granted, you may lose the tool you were just holding in a clean workshop, but you’ll find it much quicker!

When your workshop is organized, it’s always easy to find what you need. Rather than waste time searching, you can just grab the necessary tool from its designated spot and get on with your work. We like this sort of streamlined process, so we came up with 10 effective tips that are sure to help keep your workshop organized, so long as you actually implement them!

The 10 Effective Tips for Keeping your Workshop Organized

1. Pegboard Workshop Organization

Pegboard is one of the most useful items you could ever put in a workshop. Just about anything can be hung from a piece of pegboard. Cords, bits, screwdrivers, tools — you name it. Best of all, pegboard is very affordable and easy to install. You can put pegboard up anywhere there’s open space on the wall, converting it from a useless blank wall to excellent storage space.

2. Utilize Tool Cabinets

Tool cabinets are specifically built for housing tools, and they’re perfect for it. They come in all shapes and sizes, with many designs available. Our favorites have stacked rolling drawers, plus casters to make it easy to move it around.

You can get these with inserts that make it simple to organize your collection of sockets, bits, wrenches, or just about anything else. Plus, the large drawers on the bottom are great for holding your bigger tools. Most of these lock as well, providing an extra layer of security for your valuable tools.

3. Keep Similar Tools Together

If you want to avoid wasting time searching through piles of tools to find the one you need, then you’ll benefit from keeping similar tools together. For instance, pneumatic tools could all be grouped in a single chest, drawer, or cabinet. Similarly, you could have all the wrenches together or all the woodworking tools in one area.

There are several ways to break the tools into groups, and that’s up to you. You might opt to keep all saws in one place. Alternatively, you might keep wood saws with wood tools and hacksaws with metal tools. Find what works for you and stick with it.

4. Organizers for Small Items

Workshops tend to accumulate loads of little items. These include bits, washers, nuts, bolts, screws, nails, and plenty of others. Don’t just throw them all into a drawer that you’ll have to search through to find what you need. Instead, get an organizer that has a bunch of small drawers. That way, you can easily divide them up to make them easy to locate.

5. Give Everything an Assigned Place

This tip is vital for keeping a clean workshop. Give every tool an assigned place. Once a tool’s place is assigned, keep it there! Of course, you’ll need to remove it to work with it. But once you’re done working, ensure that every tool makes it back to its designated area so you can find it again when you need it.

6. Label Every Drawer

It’s great for everything to have a designated storage place, but if you can’t remember where each item belongs, it’s not going to help much. That’s where labels come into play. Labeling each drawer, cabinet, and bin with the proper designation makes it easy to figure out where to put each tool back. Even better, it becomes much easier to find the tool you need since all you have to do is look for the proper label!

7. Drawers and Cabinets Beneath Work Surfaces

Workshops generally have workbenches or tables for you to work on. But don’t let the space beneath go to waste. Instead, fill that area up with cabinets and drawers. That’s a lot of space that can be put to good use for storage but isn’t going to be good for much else. So, take advantage!

8. Shelving on Tracks

Once you start running out of space, it’s time to get creative. If you’ve got shelving on the walls, you can double it, making it twice as deep and offering twice as much storage. However, this makes it quite difficult to reach the tools on the shelves in the back. But if you get creative, you can easily get around that.

Installing your front shelves on tracks enables you to slide them out of the way for easy access to the shelves in the back. This doubles your storage capacity without the need for any additional wall space.

9. Fill the Highest Areas

As you run out of room in your workshop, you might notice that the highest corners of your walls are looking a little barren. If that’s the case, it’s time to fill them. Now, it can be difficult to reach those areas. So, once again, we have to get a bit creative.

One method we really like is sliding shelves. These shelves are stacked on top of each other from floor to ceiling. But each shelf slides out and turns into a step, allowing you to stand on it for additional reach.

10. Put Everything Away at the End of the Day

Every time you use your tools, put them back where they belong. You need to make this a habit for it to be effective. It’s essential that you do this the moment you finish working every single time. Don’t delay. If you leave those tools out, your workshop will be a mess when you return and you’ll start creating the bad habit of leaving it that way.

Conclusion

No matter how many great tips you read, they’re not going to help you if you don’t follow through and put them to use. So, your job now is to take the most effective tips you read on this list and start putting them into action, today! Go out to your workshop and take the first step now. Tomorrow, you’ll be glad you did.

Featured Image Credit: Pixabay