The Perfect Storms that Make Life Unnecessarily Difficult: My Garage

I’m not really sure where to begin.  So I’m just going to try to hit things chronologically as best I can.

Before we moved here 10+ years ago, we had a carport.  One of the things our new house had to have was a garage.  I really wanted a garage to keep the car out of the weather, and as a little extra storage.  We did buy a house with a two car garage.  When we were looking at this house we actually pulled the mega-van into the garage to see if it would fit.  It *just barely* fit.  Like if you pulled the front bumper all the way up until it was just kissing the wall to the family room, then you could probably have enough space to shut the garage door behind you.

We toyed with different ways that we could mark for me (because at that time, I was the main driver of the van) how to know when you were in the right spot to be able to close the garage door.  But in the end, I just never felt comfortable with that little margin of error.  So the van got parked outside the garage and the Honda got parked inside the garage.

I thought I could use the garage as a kind of mud room that first winter, too.  Like, if the kids came home from school from the garage I could avoid the whole backpack-jacket-boots-scarves-gloves drop INSIDE the house.  I even set up a little cubby like set of bookshelves out there for their crap.  That idea did not work.

Sometime in the next year or two, the garage door opener broke.  For one thing, the code you press on the outside of the garage didn’t work anymore.  For another, the remote in the car stopped working.  I don’t know which came first.  So pretty much that meant that the Honda was being parked in the driveway next to the van.

I don’t know exactly when our garage became a hoarder’s dream castle.  But I imagine it was some time after that when the cars didn’t go in it anymore.  I do remember that there was time every spring and every fall when we would clean out the garage and declutter.  It would always get messy, but we would always whip it back in shape, too.

Then several years ago, we were re-doing the landscaping in our yard.  We had a huge shed taking up an entire corner of our backyard and he offered to take it down and put lawn in there.  We thought that was tremendously awesome and would increase the size of our yard by quite a bit and give the kids more space to play.  We hardly used that shed.  It was actually in a low point of the yard and after it snowed, you couldn’t even open the door to get into it.

We thought it would be no big deal to store the ten bikes and the lawnmower and other lawn tools in the garage where we had so much space.

Does anybody really have space for 10 bikes?

And the bikes!  That’s a whole other saga.  We all have/had bikes. They start out new and wonderful.  But after about two uses, all the bikes have flat tires.  As in EACH bike has two flat tires.  So a year or two passes and we finally go purchase a pump and that goop that goes inside the inner tubes and the Hubba takes the time to patch up all 20 tires.  In a fit of biking ecstasy and youthful exuberance, all the kids go out for a ride.  And come home with all of their tires flat again.  So then another year or two passes and we finally get worked up to do this thing again.  We purchase the patches, the goop, the tire liners, the new bike pump since the old one was long since gone or broken and take an entire day fixing the bikes all up for use.  The kids are thrilled and take them out for their joy rides and come home with flat tires.  Again.  This situation has happened at least 5 times.  One Christmas I suggested we buy the kids Gatorskins for their tires.  But for the cost of the gatorskins, we could have purchased everyone brand new bikes.

Meanwhile, the years were passing.  We did manage to teach every child how to ride a bike, even if they did only get to do it a couple times before getting a flat that would wait years for repair.  And as they got bigger, we had to purchase bigger bikes.  At one point we had a lot more than 10 bikes in our garage.  We knew we could sell them for a decent price if only we could fix the flats first.  We did sell some.  We currently still have seven (14 flat tires!) in our garage.

Anyway, the garage was way out of control and instead of cleaning it out every spring and fall, we were down to maybe once a year.  AT one point, JJ and X cleaned it up in there and moved JJ’s drum set in there.    They used it quite a bit for one summer.  Then JJ moved his drums back in his bedroom.  And when he left on his mission he moved them back out in to the garage.

A few years ago, a family member had an emergency and needed a place to store some things.  So we quickly had a group effort to clean out the garage and make space.  Those things stayed in our garage for two or three years.

And that was pretty much the kiss of death.  Because no matter how much we cleaned or decluttered, half the garage was packed solid and no matter what we did there was just no way around the bikes and the drumset and the water storage containers and the extra bench from the van.

The garage became a maze of death and horror.  You had to carefully choose where you would step to get from one place to another.  I stopped going in there completely because I’m not as young as I used to be.  A misstep could cause serious harm if you aren’t limber.  So I started sending children in there to grab things for me.  And because it was such a hassle to get things out, no one wanted to go through all that to put things away.  So instead they/we would just open the door, stand at the threshhold and throw it in the general vicinity of where it belonged.  Which only made the next trek through the garage that much more treacherous and unpleasant.

Another funny thing about our garage:  When we moved into this house, a neighbor from our old neighborhood gave us a snowblower.  For FREE.  Because she preferred to shovel. Score!  It was a sweet deal for us because we live on a corner which means we have to shovel sidewalks in front of our house and on the side.

I hate shoveling sidewalks!  We live on a corner.  Two of the other corners are an elementary school and a middle school.  That means that a gazillion students walk to school in our walkways and pack down any snow into ice.  So for years and years I have had to get up early every snowfall morning and shovel.  One of our sidewalks is on the north side of our house and our first winter here we weren’t careful about shoveling immediately and in April the ice was several inches thick and we were using hammers and SO MUCH SALT to break up the ice.  We ruined a hammer and in the end only cleared one tiny little pathway down to the cement.  I think the last of the ice melted in June.  So since then, I’ve been pretty compulsive about making sure the snow is shoveled.  And I have hated it.

Anyway, I didn’t really know how to use the snow blower.  It intimidated me.  It still does.  So the second winter I was going to use it.  But it turns out, it didn’t work.  So I shovelled that second winter, too.  The third winter, we had our fix-it friend take a look at it and he easily fixed it up for us.  It was ready to go for that winter.  I still didn’t really know how to use it, but I was ready to try!

So I was extremely frustrated when I realized that I was never going to be able to use the snowblower.  Do you want to know why?  Because with the cars parked in the driveway, I couldn’t get the snowblower out of the garage.  That’s right.  There was no space big enough to get the snow blower out.  So all these years it has sat unused in the garage.  Every cold, blue 5am morning when my hands are frozen and I’m sweating and yet still cold and my back hurts, I think of that snow blower sitting in there–unusable.

So what does that have to do with my garage?  I don’t really know.  Except that a couple of years ago, we had to put in a new driveway.  And we widened the driveway and as part of that landscaping re-do I mentioned from years before we removed some fencing along the sides of the driveway.  What this means is that for probably the past two winters, we actually HAVE had enough space to pull that stinkin’ snowblower out and use it!.  I just didn’t even remember it anymore.

It snowed all Thanksgiving weekend.  It was cozy and beautiful.  This morning I told Kelvinator to go check to see if they needed to defrost the van for school.  They did.  The Hubba overheard this and got his shoes on to go de-ice the Honda.   It was the first snow of the season.  I just hadn’t put it together that that meant I had work to do.  I had forgotten to shovel (and now it was too late because school kids had already walked on it–I’m hoping that the weather is warm enough that this first snow will melt and I’ll have a second chance to stay on top of things).  But the Hubba jumped right on it and went out and dug the car out.  I was the first one needing to use it this morning to take Baboo to work.

And I was thinking that if we had a carport, I’d probably have less snow removal from vehicles to worry about than with our garage.  I was trying to remember what it was like to park a car inside a garage and not have to scrape it off every winter morning.  I don’t have any memories of it.  Have I just forgotten?  Or maybe I just never experienced it.  It’s possible.  Since the only time the garage door worked was when I was driving the van and the van never fit in the garage.  I was lamenting that I spent this decade of winters shoveling sidewalks and defrosting my car because of our garage problem.  I was thinking it would be nice to put the Honda in the garage.

Then as I was driving Baboo to and from work, I realized that that is a pointless wish because we won’t be able to drive this car in three days.  It has given up the ghost and we won’t be repairing or replacing it.  As of Wednesday we will be down to just one vehicle.  The vehicle that doesn’t fit in the garage anyway.