The Dreaded Task of Cleaning the Garage

 I recently had a dinner party with a few of my friends where the topic of moving came up.  My friend Allison and her husband Keith have just bought a new house, and their excitement about moving combined with the dread of packing reminded me of how Peter and I were feeling last spring when we bought our new house.  When we moved, we put away the majority of our belongings in the appropriate rooms and left the remainder in our garage.  Over the last year and a half, the garage has continued to stay in the same state (a mess!) while the interior of the house has been organized and really come to life.  Allison’s talk of packing reminded me that I still had a lot of unpacking to do!

I’m not really sure how our garage got to the point where we couldn’t walk through it.  There are of course all the items that we put in the garage after moving, but slowly it has filled with other items: a mini deep freezer, shade structures for camping, some items that friends are storing here, and inextricably mountains of empty boxes.  It has definitely made it really hard to get any of our tools to fix things or get all of our camping gear together for our summer camping trips.  This weekend I took that the stand that I would be able to walk through my garage without having to hop over anything, and to maybe even make room for a car.

We started by taking everything out of the garage first that was obviously trash.  This mainly pertained to all the cardboard boxes, their origins still largely unknown.  We burned these in the backyard and threw out anything that couldn’t be burned/recycled.  This still left us with a huge mess.  It was time for drastic measures.  I decided that since everything was completely unorganized in different piles, we would need to take every single item out of the garage.

We set up different piles throughout our yard for the major areas that would need to be organized in the garage: Peter’s tools, our camping gear, various home repair supplies like flooring and paint, and gardening supplies.  We also ended up making several additional piles for items that should be included inside our house like forgotten kitchen items, various games, a few stray pieces of furniture, and some additional crafting supplies.  The largest pile, much to my excitement, was the giveaway pile.  We took an entire car load of stuff to Goodwill.  I even decided to get rid of this hideous chair I have been keeping for the cat.  

Once all the items had been reviewed, it was surprisingly easy to get everything to fit back in the garage neatly.  We put items that related to home repair towards the back of the garage near the entrance to the house for easy access.  All our camping supplies went towards the front of the garage so it would be a breeze to load up our car.  We put everything in one long column so that we could potentially park the car inside if there were ever a need (although it would still be a tight squeeze).  

The hard part about cleaning out the garage was realizing that we now had some rooms inside the house that needed some serious work like the craft room.  We severely underestimated the amount of crafting supplies that were hiding away in the garage.  I’ll need to revamp the craft closet and potentially have some overflow into the game closet.    Unless we want to switch our master bedroom with the craft room for more space, we are going to have to make some tough decisions about keeping all our supplies, getting some new craft furniture, or very quickly making tons of costumes/scrapbooks/models out our of our supplies.  

Allison, who has become a moving guru, will offer some tips next week on staying organized during your big move to make unpacking easier.  Considering how organized she is, I bet she and Keith will avoid the garage abyss that awaited us after our first move.

• Jess's blog