I am sure your garage doesn’t look like mine.
You probably actually park your car in it. It’s probably big enough for two or three cars, not just one. You probably don’t use your garage as a pantry and, in the winter, an extra refrigerator. Your home no doubt has other storage areas – your garage does not have to hold everything that doesn’t get pride of place in the living room.
I’ll bet your garage is even insulated and nicely painted inside. You probably stress over small errant oil stains on the polished concrete floor.
Then again, your vehicles never drip.
Your garage has built-in cupboards and customized shelving and task lighting. Your garage has storage bins in matching colors mounted in grids on the walls, organized by season. Every tool is hanging in its appointed spot – perhaps outlined on the pegboard paneling like the body at a crime scene.
Neither Husband nor I are the most practical of persons. We tend to ignore unpleasantness and trust in future developments and cling to the belief that the shoemaker’s elves will come round in the night and take care of everything for us.
So far, the garage hasn’t been their priority. Until then, we stuff things and stack things and forget things. Especially in winter.
Yesterday, I needed something out there. I know right where it is! I am proud.
The item is in a plastic tub nested below two other plastic tubs. Someone (read, “not me”) has stacked a cooler full of something heavy on top of those, and piled a couple of stadium chairs above that.
It’s a life-sized game of Jenga.
Seven hours later, the garage is clean and neat and, more importantly, safe. And I’ve forgotten what I needed out there in the first place.
My garage is nonexistent. The shoemakers elves have not seen fit to build it. Therefore, everything that does not get pride of place in the living room is stashed under furniture, piled in closets ( beware he who dares to open one) or “hiding” behind trees out in the yard. At least I don’t have to tidy and organize the trees.
We tell ourselves we’ve downsized — when in fact we never got around to upsizing. I like the behind-the-trees idea! And if skeletons were all we had in the closets, I’d be a happy woman.
It was even more fun with an actual bear in the cave!
Yes, poor Husband escaped out there for several years when we had Son #1 and Son #2 and Girlfriend of Son #1 all living with us. He had a space heater and a rug and his music and a spot at the workbench with a bare hanging lightbulb to lend ambiance. I was actually jealous. I had only the furnace room to retreat to.
Only 7 hours???? OUR garage (and I’m not bragging here) would need 7 days, and that might be optimistic. Besides, when we start on the garage, we rapidly get discouraged and go do something more fun. Generations have stowed stuff in our garage, though it was only built by my father, so 3, counting our children (tho most of their stuff is in the attic), and stuff from my husband’s side of the family which has traveled from Oregon to dry out in our garage. Waiting for sorting and tossing. And we also use it as an extra refrigerator or even freezer ( the garage is sometimes colder than the inside of the fridge). I should take your good example and tackle it. Tomorrow.
I may have deliberately given the wrong impression. I do that, sometimes. Seven hours at least made a path through the center of the garage where one can walk without imminent danger of being crushed. I did manage to get the Christmas stuff put away. And I found some forgotten potatoes that looked like a junior high science experiment (for that matter, they might have been one. I’d not poked into that corner for years).
Thank goodness.
We have the same garage, apparently. But I read snuck in there that you did quite a tidy!
Want to come over and visit? Totally unrelated, I swear…
I’m rather suspicious of people with pristine garages. A neat and clean desk I can overlook, but an overly tidy garage? Those people are hiding things. So to speak.