Our master bathroom makeover is so close to being done – I just have to finish building my new towel ladder and some shelves (and you know, clean up all the tools and paint cans). But…I’ve become completely distracted by our garage that the ladder and shelves are on hold.
What’s going on in the garage? OMG – where do I start?! Let me first just share this picture, you know, for context.
I know, I know, I know. It’s terrible. Let me give you some background: When Chris and I bought the house with my parents we agreed that we would split the garage space – half for Chris & I and half for my parents (seemed fair), but in reality the split ended up being half my dad’s workshop and half for everything else (storage, recycling bins, bikes etc.).
Over time, the workshop ended up eating all the household tools and became fondly referred to as the place where tools would go to die. No joke, I started hiding tools in the linen closet just so that I would know where to find them.
And then there was the wall.
I’m not going to get into the whole long story of why my dad felt he needed to build the wall or the details of the slowly leaning structure and the resulting death trappiness of the overcrowded workspace. We’re just going to move past all the tears and fire hazards and celebrate the fact that I’ve finally been given permission to reorganize the garage and make it a functional (and safe) space that everyone can use.
After doing a little happy dance I create my plan of attack – first step, organize everything! I started sorting everything into very general categories like things that wrench, things that screw, things that are screwed and painting things. Then each of those categories were sorted again into small bins – scissors in one, chisels in another and so on. Everything that I could not identify got tossed into a WTF bin for Chris to pick through later.
A lot of stuff got thrown out at this point and many trips to the dump and to donation centres later, the wall finally came down.
Not going to lie, after a few high-fives I did a little happy dance. And then it started to dawn on me what a ridiculously huge project this is going to end up being. We’ve accomplished so much, but the garage is still a giant mess.
It has to get worse before it gets better right? I’m just going to keep saying that to myself. Maybe I’ll stitch it on a pillow.
So what next? We begin Garage 2.0! I could create a really fancy looking 3D artist’s rendering, but you’re just going to have to trust me when I say it will be awesome.
Chris has already started building shelves above the garage doors for out of the way storage and I’m working on some other solutions to maximize our space. I’ve found a lot of great ideas for projects and am collecting them all on Pinterest (as per usual).