Reclaiming the Garage

I think our garage is pretty typical of most people. You probably have a car in there (mine parks on the right every night). You probably have a bunch of junk in there too (that’s all our stuff on the left). We try in vain every few months to clean it up, but it’s always a mess again in a few weeks. I inherited that large pile of bricks when I bought the house. H received that swanky tool drawer as a wedding gift. I’ve got lots of gardening supplies laying around.

Our first step was to move the pile of bricks. We’d discussed using them to line our trees or flowerbeds around the house. H started working on that Sunday, but he didn’t get too far.

So the bricks all ended up in a pile about 20′ from where the started. We still hope to do something with them & hope they aren’t still sitting there in 6 months. I do think we will have to call in some professionals to make something pretty out of them.

We threw away lots of stuff & are going to be storing some of the stuff in our attic, but this was the pile of everything else just in the way. H wanted to even see if our 2 cars would fit, so he emptied out everything into our yard.

Wah-lah! They both fit & we have a few inches to spare for the manly tool chest, recycling bin and garbage can. Where did all this stuff go you ask?

Yes, we are now “those people” with a stupid little storage shed in our backyard. I really resisted and put it off as long as I could, but with H’s new car, I wanted him to be able to park in the garage too. I’d been driving his truck the past few months & I hated parking outside, especially during the winter.

To my shock & horror, I opened up the shed to take a photo of the nice & neat way that we had organized and arranged all of our camping equipment and lawn supplies. I discovered that my husband had simply tossed in the “everything else in the garage” pile! Let’s see what we’ve got here: shop vac, blower, fertilizer, golf clubs, plant food, tennis racket, broom and my nicely stacked camping equipment in the background. We’ll have to work on this…

As part of this whole relocate the contents of the garage to a shed in the backyard project, I moved up our side fence. It was about 20′ further back down the side of the house. I had always hated it, because people could simply walk up and look into our dining room window or into the frosted glass of our master bathroom. Hopefully this will be a little more safe & secure.