Cleaning the Garage (Pictures Omitted)

What a lousy weekend we had this week.

With spring quickly on the way (knock on wood) and our calendar seeming to get fuller and fuller by the day, this past Saturday seemed by default to fit as the best possible day in the next couple of months to do some cleaning in the garage.

I know that cleaning the garage doesn’t seem like a big deal or anything. Everyone does it right? Well, our garage was special on an epic scale. This had been a project that had been neglected for quite some time. We have done many, many “straightening of the garage” projects, in which stacks of crud that have fallen over are put back into tidy stacks of crud but that wasn’t at all what we had in mind this time around. We actually wanted to CLEAN the garage.

Our living quarters is normally very tidy but through a lot of neglect and just kind of chucking stuff in there, the garage was just absolutely, completely out of hand. I took a couple of “before” pictures but they are just too embarrassing to post here. Just imagine this scene without the seagulls…



…although the seagulls surely would have been in there too if it hadn’t been for the closed garage door. Thankfully very few people had a glimpse into what things had started to look like in there. (We thank the Buttons in advance for not sharing their comments or witness testimony.)

A few years back, we had invested heavily in mass quantities of Rubbermaid type containers in an effort to neaten things up. This was a great idea in theory but in reality, we had stuffed a bunch of things that we really didn’t need any more into those containers and stacked them back in there.

This time around, we actually pulled all of those containers back into the house where each and every one will be reviewed and scrutinized before it makes it back out to the garage. We are sick of storing stuff just for the sake of storing it.

By Saturday evening, the garage was quite nice. I could see concrete floor everywhere I looked. What a beautiful site! I had taken a trip to the dump, realizing how amazing it is how much stuff can fit in a van when you take the seats out and we had taken another full load to the D.I. as well.

Of course with the garage now clean, the living room and dining room are stacked floor to ceiling with the Rubbermaid totes I had mentioned earlier. We will spend out free time in the next week weeding through those and hopefully placing a lot less back in the garage then we took out.

On Sunday evening, we did enjoy sorting through some of the things in there bins though. We found photo albums that have not been seen in forever and have also found loads of toys that we are trying not to let the boys spot before we can get rid of them again. We are trying to find the right balance between sentimentality and practicality. At the moment, the scale is leaning very heavily towards practicality. I think we sorted through like five bins yesterday and ended up with only one bin of stuff total that is being kept.

Last night Valerie also had a sad time sorting through Sarah’s old baby clothes that have been packed away for the past 10 years. I think she was a little sad that she only gets to buy boy clothes now and maybe even sadder about the ugly stuff that was available back in the mid-90’s. Winnie the Pooh sweatshirts and acid-washed baby jeans? Yuck. She did pick out a few of the cuter things that meant something to her but the rest were quickly gone.

Deseret Industries better get some shelf space cleared out. We have a lot of stuff on the way.