Once upon a time the garage looked like that. Since the obscenely expensive repair job on the bike, she now looks better than she did then. The garage door closes about 6 inches behind the top box on the bike, which means there's another 3 meters of garage hidden by boxes. It's just as full as it seems.

Step one was to get rid of the cardboard boxes. They were sorted out into those boxes that I needed to keep for resale purposes and those boxes that could genuinely be scrapped. The scrapped pile got flattened and the keep collection (bar the V-Drum boxes) got stored in the loft.

Several months on I finally got a skip. With the skip firmly on the drive, it was time to look at the enormous amounts of wood and materials sitting in the garage and on the decking by the kitchen. The sorting here was harder than the boxes, but once I'd worked out the rule of thumb it became easier.

When you have multiple of the same material, keep one or two pieces that are perfect and ditch the rest.

• Step one was laying out all of the non-building material items in the garden and grouping them up to see what bits and pieces (beyond a lot of wood!) we actually owned that needed to be stored back in the garage (first picture, below).
• Step two was dealing with the building materials. So out when a lot of ex-wardrobe, carpet and whatever garden waste was left over from our previous gutting effort.
• Step three: examining the space in the garage and deciding what to do with it.

The resultant can be seen here in the third picture, something of an improvement! Previously the black shelving featured in picture two was up against the back wall (picture two is a shot through the side door), so rotating that 90 degrees against the side wall gives me a lot of space to put up a pseudo-splashback for pinning tools on.

The rather dark looking fourth picture is a shot from over the top of the bikes screen to show the splashback and the extra space gained for the mower (nuisance shape that it is). The shelf on the right is an addition, so everything can be kept off the floor and Pam has somewhere for her gardening items.

All of this tidying means that the decking at the back has been cleared of rubbish too.

Net result, a ton more space in the garage and a happy girlfriend.