My 99-Year-Old Grandpa’s Organizing Rule Is Totally Ingenious

My 99-year-old grandpa is one of those people who can build or fix just about anything — and I mean anything. This has led to him accumulating everything from electrical wires and timber offcuts to vintage tools and every color of paint swatch you’ll find at the hardware store. Yet somehow, when asked to find the most random item, he can do it with his eyes closed. That’s because he follows one very simple-yet-ingenious organizing rule.

His secret is simple. Everything has a home, and he swears by the following rule: “If you can’t see it, you won’t use it.”  

With his centennial birthday fast approaching, over the past few years my grandpa has slowly been passing down some of the tools and items he’s collected over his lifetime. My love for DIY and building absolutely comes from him, and I’ll always cherish the memories we’ve made working on projects together. So when he started offering to pass things on, my entire family welcomed it with open arms — not just for the quality of the items, but also for the sentimental value. 

But there’s been one setback: He’s been hesitant to share more because every time he visited my mom’s house, he’d glance at the cluttered and disorganized garage and say, “You have no room or space for any of my things.” And he wasn’t wrong. 

My mom’s garage had become a cluttered catch-all — full of miscellaneous items, mismatched bins, and a chipboard slab with rusty, broken nails as hooks. Nothing had a home, and I could understand why it didn’t feel right for my grandpa to hand over his prized tools into that kind of chaos. 

That’s when I decided we needed a solution that would give him peace of mind that we weren’t just planning on collecting his things for the sake of it, but we genuinely wanted and valued them enough to store them in the same caring manner that he would: out in the open. So it was time to build a pegboard. 

At first I tried to follow what my grandpa had always taught me: Where possible, reduce, reuse, and recycle. I took down the old chipboard panel, tossed the rusty nails, and then spent the next three days drilling over 2,000 holes — only to realize the board was too thick for any pegboard hooks on the market. A classic DIY fail (at least it gave my grandpa a good laugh). Eventually, I gave in and bought a new pegboard (which, to my joy, was on clearance for $5) and ordered a $19 hook set that also came with little baskets for items like loose screws. 

My mom and I started by sorting through everything from the original board, where we quickly realized we probably didn’t need 10 different measuring tapes. We made one pile for donations and another for anything too far gone to save, and only kept what was meaningful or useful. With my grandpa’s help, I drilled into the brick wall and secured two pieces of leftover pine from a former project for the board to sit on. From there, I took my time creating a layout that made sense, because, after all, function is just as important as visibility. The final result was a board where every item had its place, with plenty of room for the collection to grow. 

While the organizational lesson stands, as I stepped back to look at the finished display I realized this was never just about tidying a garage — it was about showing my grandpa that his tools, and the values he’s passed down with them, have a safe and lasting home with us. 

Now when he visits he doesn’t say, “There’s no room” — rather, he smiles and points to the board and tells stories about the time he used that screwdriver or wrench. It’s given him peace of mind, my mom a clean and practical space, and me a daily reminder that the things we use and the people we love deserve to be seen. And now we can see every tool, and can be sure to use them.