A space of my own

I decided it was time to clear out the garage today. It’s become increasingly hard to remember if it actually has a back, or simply an endless forest of broken garden equipment and old children’s toys. Possibly Narnia is back there somewhere.

Anyway, it has always seemed a shame to have effectively another room that we never make use of, and having time on my hands now seemed the perfect time to make a project out of it.

The first thing to tackle was the bikes. For some reason, we have six of them. As a family of four, this seems excessive. I’ve found very few occasions where I felt the need to ride more than one bike. There have been fairly few occasions when I’ve felt the need to ride one, although Sue disagrees. She insists I love cycling and am always clamouring at the bit to go on another cycling holiday. It was her idea to cycle the Way of the Roses. I’ll admit, I enjoyed it. Mostly the snacks.

Anyone, the bikes had to be moved. Eventually, the plan would be to mount them out of the way, either on the wall or hoisted on pullies until they rest among the rafters like pigeons with disk brakes. That’s phase 2 of the plan though. Phase 1 is simply to be able to see the wall.

In order to move the bikes, I first had to move all the rubbish that has accumulated at the front of the garage. Like most people, my garage has little to do with storing cars and much more to do with being a dumping ground for old gardening equipment that I was convinced I was going to use but turned out to require too much in the way of time, dedication and basic interest in gardening. I have trellises, seed pots, slug pellets and six types of compost. One of them was for cacti. I don’t have any cacti. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I would have done if I’d just remembered to put down the compost.

With the patience of Hercules, I began the mammoth task of removing everything from the garage and sorting it into two piles: things to keep and things to take down the dump. Much has been made of Mari Kondo. I’m sure her techniques are useful in the right circumstances. I wasn’t about to hold up a bag of fertilizer to my chest and see if it sparked joy though. Instead, I fell back on the time-honoured tradition of setting out to throw away everything I no longer need, then finding myself convinced that I still have a use for a dried-up container of floor oil and a half-used tin of emulsion.

I was hard on myself though. Eventually, I managed to place in the chuck pile the following:

I was pretty pleased with myself. And the garage looked amazing. I had never seen so much space.

That was when I realised everything still had to go back into the garage. Including the contents of the chuck pile, since the dump is not deemed a necessary journey.

Slowly, I repopulated the garage and then stood back to regard the fruits my hard work. A still messy garage but with the contents in a slightly different order. Still, I felt proud of myself. It may have taken all day, but at least I had identified eight items I no longer needed. I was a master of my domain, a king of clearance, I had demonstrated the basic skills of being an adult who owns his own home. I could take a garage and make it a marginally less full garage.

What more does a man need?

Tomorrow I’m going to tackle the loft.