Clean Garage Envy

Clean-Garage Envy.  I have it. Our garage is so packed with stuff that I try to keep the doors closed as much as possible.  Thankfully, we have a van.  It gets parked smack in front of the right side garage door—heaven knows there’s no way it will make it over the threshold to actually rest in the garage.  It’s useful for blockage purposes should the door have to be raised for some reason.  And, when one of the doors has to be opened at night (say, to remove a garbage can), I make sure the lights are off as the door rolls up—there’s no sense in putting a spotlight on the horror.  It’s a little tricky getting back to the light switch (all the way across the garage) after closing the big door in the dark, but fear of ridicule can compel a person to push past her fear of injury.

Many of my friends are the proud owners of clean garages.  “Friends”--may I call them what they truly are—FREAKS!   I look around as we head through their spotless garages on our way to their spotless kitchens, and I am just amazed at the fact that you can actually see their walls!  How does this happen?    How in the world do they manage all their stuff?  Maybe there’s a more basic question to ask.  Do they even have stuff?  Could it be possible that they are completely stuffless?  I start to ponder…

It’s true that our tightly packed garage contains some plain old junk that could/should be thrown away.  But taking a mental tour, I realize that there are a lot of items in our garage that have been instrumental in saving us money over the years.  There are the tools The Man has used to work on our vehicles.   Thousands and thousands of dollars have been saved because of his mechanical ability, no question.  Then there are the chemicals, scrapers, heat gun, and stains, etc. that I’ve used to refinish furniture…that stuff takes up a lot of space in the garage too.   But we have some pretty nice pieces in the house as a result of utilizing those things.  There is an empty box section, created by hoarding the boxes delivered to our home that at one time held things we’d bought online.  Since we sometimes do business on eBay, those boxes come in handy when it’s time to ship out our goods.  (No box expenses for us!)  Then there is the leftover tile, partial bags of grout, and thinset from previous tiling projects.  The Man never wants to run short, or be unable to fix a broken tile should one ever break in the future, (which will never happen because we are tiling maniacs and always butter the back of the tile, use flexible thinset, and make sure the underlayment is adequately rigid!)  Of course you can’t lay tile, without a tile cutter and tools.  If we hired someone to do the tiling, we might not have so much project residue, but we’d have much less cash too.  So, I can’t feel too bad about all that “junk”—it’s earned its keep.

Then there’s the other stuff--the overflow from the kitchen, for example.  But come on—who has room in their kitchen to store one of those counter top turkey roasters?  I mean it’s practically a room in itself!  How about big plastic cake carriers--you going to allow them to hog up prime kitchen real estate?  I think not.  And what about Easter baskets and that obnoxious green grass that you can save in a plastic bag to reuse year after year (if you’re cheap like I am). 

How about the gardening things?  Pots, grass seed, fertilizer, potting soil, tools—they all take up space, but they’re necessary tools for landscaping which has a direct correlation to your place in the neighborhood pecking order.  

Like all normal Americans, we have a plethora of plastic totes housed on big plastic shelves.

Plastic tote 1:  old towels.   They come in handy in a variety of ways.  When some nasty accident happens (think plumbing problems) you want to use your good towels?  I didn’t think so.

Plastic tote 2:   backpacks and bags—those items must be corralled.  I guess we don’t need quite so many now that two of the kids are out of the house—I’ll have to dig through that one when the opportunity presents itself.

Plastic tote 3:  winter hats, gloves, scarves  (We live in the northeast, and I’d like to keep my ears and fingers, thank you.)

Plastic tote 4:  Extra winter coats (some of those could probably go, but I only have so much power to toss things that don’t belong to me)

Plastic tote 5:  Old sports equipment.  (Son #2 says, “It’s the only thing I have in there, so please leave it alone!” What can a mother do?

Plastic tote 6:  Stuff left from daughter.  She says toss it, but I can’t—too many memories. 

Plastic tote 7:   picture frames, foolishly taken down after watching too many real estate shows on HGTV.  (“The pictures make the rooms look cluttered.”)

Plastic tote 8:  Car waxes, cleaners, etc. (Those probably should be gone through—we’re the type of people that get excited about keeping a new car clean and polished—for about two weeks.)

Turning the corner to the back wall, we see wood scraps in the corner.  You never know when you’ll need a piece of wood.  I can’t count the number of times The Man has been trying to make household repair and asks, “Hey, do we have a piece of 2X4 anywhere?”  Yes, indeed, we do!

Now for the big boys:  There are at least 12 tires in that space.  Four left by #1 son.  Four are snow tires, and four are new tires.   (Note to self:  have a tire talk with The Man.)

We also have a big, fat, yet-to-be-used generator, sitting in its box.  We had to get one of those after hearing friends’ nightmare stories of being stuck without power in the middle of the winter.  And who can live without an overflow refrigerator, an extra-large wetvac, a chainsaw, and a drill press?  Now not everyone has a garbage bag of wool from her sister’s sheep (future felting project), like we have— I’ll grant you that.  But most people have painting equipment and leftover paint cans from painting their daughter’s room a deep shade of red that took forever to dry between coats and made the room really dark,  don’t they?  Oh, and what about ladders?  How else do you get up to your roof?

Our garage has an attic too.  It is loaded with all the books our kids read when they were little.  Those aren’t going anywhere—they’ll get pulled down for the future darling grandchildren.  The ones who will one day, love to read with their favorite grandmother.  

Yep, there’s a lot of stuff in there and it could be better organized, and yes, I still envy those clean garages, but after analyzing the situation, I realize most of that stuff has a purpose—Yea!  We’re not just total slobs!  But then there’s the shed….