My husband came in and told me that I was taking this ‘decluttering thing’ too far when he caught me vacuuming out my tool boxes. He told me it was against the tool welding code to vacuum tool boxes in the first place. If you have a tool box, it is supposed to be messy and have dust. lol!

But alas… my tool boxes now have no dust. Each one (one for garage and one for house) has a multi head screwdriver (yet another “no-man’s” idea… according to most men I have met, if it has more than one use it isn’t a “real” tool), needle nose pliers, a small wrench, tape measure, a level, and a good hammer. All of those little bobs and bits that have cluttered the bottom of my tool box and various bags and boxes throughout the years are now all neatly in mason jars and I will probably follow that ancient tradition of screwing all the tops under a shelf in the hopes that they will stay neat and out of the way… at least for a little while.

This really is the best way to keep these types of things. I currently have one jar for each; nails, screws, tacks, batteries, cup hooks, picture hooks, and headless tack nails (for woodworking).

I threw away a lot though. Old tiny bits of used sand paper, paper plans, bolts from beds we haven’t had for years, etc. It all went. The garage tool box lowest section was dedicated to all the things we definitely will need, but don’t need very often. Things like dry wall patch, wood putty and the putty knife, touch up paint for the car, packages of wool pads for the bottoms of chair legs, the knife sharpener… stuff like that.

I went from a whole cabinet to a milk crate and my two tool boxes. It feels pretty darned good… Even if I could have done it less meticulously (according to The Man anyway.  ).

Creative Storage Solutions

Do you have any interesting storage solutions? We’d love to hear about them!

For more organization ideas, check out Val’s personal blog, Collecting the Moments!