Organzing for Fishing and Hunting (and inventing)

Mills Fleet Farm � News And More

This guy has a pretty cool system for his fishing and hunting gear. Its pretty similiar to my storage system. Both of us use plastic bins. Each bin has an inventory of items, a major subject label and sequential number or letter, and a physical location. What he has done is created a series of numerical bays between the rafters in his garage. I think thats a pretty decent idea.

What I did was to set my garage up as a spreadsheet, with a location every 2 feet. Each location also has a height identifier. A typical location might be H6-4. That tells me it is in position H which is in the center of my garage, 6 feet from the front of my garage, and the 4 tells me it is on a shelf located 4 feet off the floor.

Then, I have a computer database of every part, and its location. Thus I can search for casters, and it comes back with H6-4, and I know where to find them. Or I could search for vinyl tubing, and it tells me P14-7. The system works pretty well, but I have yet to get everything entered. It is a slow process of data entry, but one that does save time, and money.

He goes on with the clear tub idea. The only problem with the clear ones, is they tend to be brittle and crack. I’m a fan of the thick Rubbermaid units, as I have yet to break one. However, this does require using a laminted list of items on the outside of the box, and that is a pain.

Now what would be cool is a bar code reader and printer, but thats getting a little overkill for garage organization, or is it?