We’re lucky to have a double-sized detached garage at our home. The garage has always been full of ‘stuff’… In fact it’s hard to remember a time in the fifteen years since we moved here when it was anything approaching what could be defined as ’empty’. I suppose the last time it was ‘truly empty’, was the day before we moved in, back in September 1997. Since then, most of the time, at least one half of the garage has been a chaotic jumble of the aforementioned ‘stuff’ looking like a set-piece from American Pickers or the devastation left after a major tsunami has swept through a Japanese town.
There was a time when Sharon and I kept one of our cars at a time in the garage (we used to be a two car household ‘back in the day’). We could only use one side however, the other was so full of ‘stuff’, it was hard to navigate a path through in order to get to the inside of the second up-and-over door. It was a difficult task to easily get out of the car sometimes.
Now I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting old, I’m better organised now or simply that my memory is failing, but now it’s also getting harder to remember what most of that ‘stuff’ that contributed to the chaos was. It just goes to show that we probably didn’t need most of it. I do remember there was the obvious ‘clutter’, such as various family bicycles, larger pieces of gardening equipment (the stuff that was too big to hang on the walls), motorcycles (my own, then our eldest son’s bike), steam washers, a large box of Christmas decorations (now banished to a home in the rafters), skate boards and until a few years ago a large chest freezer. But what filled in the smaller gaps?
When we considerably downsized our video production business in April 2010, we moved out of an office suite with a large racked-out storage area and workshop, back to our home. As professional video production requires a large amount of equipment, this inevitably meant all the equipment moved with us; far too much to fit inside the house. So the majority of that equipment ended up in the garage too.
When I decided about a year ago to build a workshop to ‘do woodwork’ at home, the obvious first step wast to ‘clear the clutter’. The plan was to identify everything that can be transported to the town dump and keep the ‘useful’ stuff. Sounds a simple enough plan right?
However, deciding what to keep and what to trash is often surprisingly difficult. I suppose inside most of us there’s a little bit of a hoarder. I found myself thinking (sometimes aloud) ‘perhaps I should keep that 6″ piece of plastic sheet, just in case I get a puncture in an inflatable mattress’ or ‘I may need that bent piece of metal… it could come in handy… not too sure what for right now though’!
I had to get ruthless… Sharon offered the advice “If you haven’t used it in six months, throw it away”… Great! that would mean most of my tools, one of the garage doors, all my power tools and all the painting materials. Well that wasn’t going to happen. But I did make some difficult choices (sometimes with a little help from my youngest son) and a number of trips to the tip were made. At the time I was using a large Nissan 4×4 as a production vehicle for my business and this really helped as it had a reasonable capacity to load up with the soon to be dumped trash and transport it to it’s final resting place.
Anyway after a long hard slog the garage was looking suitably empty. Well, as empty as it can look with two racks of shelving down the back wall, a large work bench replacing the space originally occupied by the now long gone freezer, the rafters full of boxes and bikes and gardening implements taking up about a quarter of the available space… sigh!
The quest for more room (or at least the efficient use thereof), is an ever continuing one. Even now when my workshop is up and running, I still find I have not got enough places to store everything, and enough ‘space’ to be comfortable when undertaking projects.
Perhaps I should have called this ‘Space the final frontier’?
Next step was to start putting together the workshop…
Turning Out Nicely... 