The Great Houdini Garage Experiment

Since we lack storage space in our house, our garage becomes the catch all for the crap that we can't cram into the house. (What? Put our car in there? Who uses a garage for that?) Every once in awhile it starts getting to "Hoarders" level of mess and needs to be cleaned out so this was the weekend the hubby and I decided to make it disappear. Not the whole garage, just the mess that had become the garage.

For some reason, I didn't anticipate this project being as big as it was.

The biggest problem is that the garage not only holds all the stuff we know we want to keep, it also holds the maybes. As in we know we aren't using this item now, but we don't want to get rid of it just in case we might need it again. This leads us to hold onto a bunch of crap that we are probably going to end up throwing out another two garage cleanings from now because no one has, in fact, used it since it left the house and entered garage land.

The second biggest problem is that it also holds the stuff that we aren't keeping. Throwing out that broken fan? Chuck it in the garage until the husband takes a run to the dump to get rid of it. (It beats leaving it in the yard and making our yard the dump, right?) The only problem with that is eventually stuff is buried by other stuff and then it take 3 months for that fan to make it to the dump because, hey, out of sight, out of mind, right?

This is usually what my garage looks like. Pictures have been copied from anonymous garages to protect the innocent.

We started "The Big Garage Showdown" after lunch. I figured by 4 I'd be back in the house working on our mountainous piles of laundry. WRONG! At four I'm still sorting through clutter asking, "Are we saving this?" "What is that?" and "Why do we need this again?" The driveway, where we have been moving the stuff we are "definitely getting rid of this time", is really starting to look like a junkyard now. If we heap it any higher, I might lose sight of my car parked at the end.

Finally I had to leave to start a load of laundry lest my Sunday be turned into "The Day That I Was a Slave to My Washing Machine". I'm dirty, tired, and my feet hurt because I'm not usually on them for 3 hours in a row. (I blame my cushy desk job.) And worst of all, the mental image of how the garage would look in the short two hours it took to clean it out resembles in no way what it actually looks like four hours later.

See, this is why people take Prozac. To soften reality's harsh edges. Maybe I should sign myself up.

What I imagined my fabulously organized garage would look like.