It isn’t that Christy Hobart doesn’t have closets. She does — lots. When she and her husband, Henry Shapiro, doubled the size of their Cape Cod–style house in Santa Monica, adding storage was a priority. They even splurged and put four large closets in the garage. So how did the garage come to be, as Henry says, “a daunting mess”?

Somehow it became the dumping ground for anything that didn’t immediately find a spot in their newly renovated home, which had belonged to Christy’s grandparents and which the couple now share with their daughter, age four, and son, eight. A small mountain grew, thing by thing: a kiddie pool, an old kitchen table, dead printers, wrapping paper, garden tools, vintage ceramic lamps, four broken beach umbrellas, a breast pump, unopened boxes from their 1999 move from New York to California—and that’s just for starters. Forget the brand-new garage closets; the family couldn’t even get to them.

“I’m frozen because I’m too nervous about how to use the closets properly,” says Christy, a 43-year-old freelance writer. “I’m terrified of putting things in the wrong place.”

Henry, also 43, who does market research for movie studios, is just as frustrated. “Where do you begin?” he asks. “We can’t even fit a car in there, because we have so much crap. We bought so many things to store things in, we almost need storage for our storage things.”

Clearly something had to give. Real Simple helped them reach the bottom of that mountainous pile and recover from their classic case of organizer’s block.