For the second time since we moved into the house, our garage is nearly clean enough to put two cars into it!

The first time was when we moved into the house; the previous occupant, a friend of ours since we purchased the house from people we knew, asked if he could keep an old car he was restoring in the garage until he found another place for it. When he moved the car shortly after, we chould have put a second car in there, but since we had only one, well, we didn't.

The unused space was eventually used to store all of the gear from my troubled business when we moved out of the office space. All of the gear was stacked in boxes until we found another office. Almost ten years later, still no new office, although much of the gear has been unpacked in the basement or home office, and then since been replaced.

Then three years ago we remodeled our house. The whole house. We arranged to keep some space in the basement for weather-safe storage (and the running computers), and moved everything else into the garage. Since we moved out for five months, we even piled stuff where the car would be parked.

In that time we have gone through a long two-car period, although we're back to one now (the wife takes the bus), plus my motorcycle. This spring some serious cleaning has occurred, and now there's space again!

I let the wife take all of the old PC monitors that were in the garage, as well as a few old PCs (after I pull the hard drives--who knows what's on 'em--we used to run a small business with them, and the potentially personal information on them may not just be ours), and some boxes of never-to-be-used-again cables. Also gone are boxes filled with network, sound, I/O and video cards. I also "released" (but they're still stacked in the garage) three or four huge boxes of books related to writing software; some were damaged by weather or improper storage, while others are just plain out of date (who writes Windows 95 device drivers any more?).

She also agreed to get rid of some of the furniture that had been stacked up there. Stuff she was sure she'd find a place for or time to refinish. Some inexpensive pre-fab CD and VHS storage cabinets, a pre-fab rolling file cabinet, and a crusty old not-prefab, but not antique, child's dresser left behind by the previous owners. The kid left in the house is 17, and she's got an appropriate sized dresser; the other kid, who's left the house, still has a dresser in the house as his new studio apartment isn't quite big enough for it.

The wife has done an amazing job. We've bundled (loosely saying "we" as she's done most of that; I just carried some heavier bits of stuff when I wasn't other wise occupied) three full Jeep-loads of rubbish to the self-haul center; stuff the trash won't take (electronics), or that they charge too much for ($20/each for furniture instead of $20/load). There's still a pile of stuff bound for the trash in the garage, but it's not as big as it may sound by me saying "pile of stuff."

She had done a good job of rearranging yesterday, when I piped in and suggested I help reduce some of the piles on the shelves on one side of the garage. We'd gone shopping earlier in the day and picked up some wall-mounts for the bicycles and yard tools, with plans to mount much of the stuff piled against the walls. The garage door isn't quite centered (few are, right?), with the South side a mere 18" deep while the North side is almost double that. All of the shelving in the garage (that she plans to replace with something that won't rust, but that's for later) is 18" or less, so we decided to put them against the South wall (which is also sheet-rocked), and mount the rest on the North wall (which is bare stud).

When I came in and suggested I help remove some more rubbish-bound stuff from the shelves, it turned into a whole rearranging of the garage. We're both glad it happened. The stuff left on the shelves is more intelligently and compactly organized; much of the loss of intelligence and lack of organization coming from the interceding retreival of goods and insertion of other long-term storeables... The work resulted in all of the shelving moving to the South wall, freeing the North wall for our intended bike and tool mounting.

One thing we noticed as we were congratulating each other for a job well-done is that we put the deeper shelves closer to the door (they were just moved first and that seemed to make sense). This didn't seem troublesome until I pointed out that the garage door hangs directly over the front of the shelving, and that if the door was wet from rain that any dripping water might fall on the shelf contents. We decided to wait and see before either moving the 12" deep shelves to the door side, or hanging some barrier over the shelves for protection.

Then, since we were on a roll, we hung the bikes for the house (the boy-child has left three full or partial bikes, and the girl-child has a too-small bike from when she was also smaller, none of which were hung). We also hung the ladder off the ground, and behind the biles. The bike mounts hold the bikes horizontally by the cross bar (the one that hurts boys more when they crash...). While the handlebars and pedals stick out a bit, they're not sticking out any farther than the shelves had been, so it's quite a bit more open.

With the shelving gone I took a moment and tucked more of the tools into the stud-space. We left the design and build of the hanging tool array for another day. This one was long enough.

Even with the tools not neatly hung, the garage is almost as neat as our neighbor's (which contains only a big wheel and a shovel...) and her neigbor's on the other side, who is retired and has spent many days organizing his garage to the point where he's traced the tools on his peg-board...

Once they complete the alley, we'll be able to comfortably park the Jeep and motorcycle without squeezing anything in place. Even when I get a bigger motorcycle, we may have space to put another smaller-than-an-Explorer vehicle in there, too.

Kudos to the wife.