Holiday Weekend Project: The Garagening

This is day 3 of my 4-day holiday weekend, and I was not going to allow this one to pass by without accomplishing something. So today, we had the culmination of a three-day project to turn our 3-bay storage bin into a 3-bay garage.

- Step 1: Take the cars outside, and drag everything out

- Step 2: Divide crap into good crap, garage sale crap and crap crap


- Step 3: Throw crap crap away, and break down boxes


- Step 4: Gather and price items for sale


- Step 5: Hold garage sale

- Step 6: Give leftover sale items away for free, donate them to charity or throw them away

- Step 7: Aftermath. . .Clean up all remaining items, and tuck everything away on shelves or perimeter wall

Everything is done except to drop off all of the leftover crap to charity, which will happen in the next half hour.  There is still garbage to go to the curb, of course (has to wait until Wednesday), two pieces of furniture with no home (under the blue blanket), and a Pilate's machine left by The Former Roommate (to be Craig's Listed very, very soon).  In fact, about 1/5 of the stuff you see on those shelves is from TFR, so Richie if you're reading this, come gitcher stuff!  But the end result has made me very happy (and tired, sweaty and dirty).   Now, for 1-1/2 days of rest and relaxation. . .

My Saturday Project: Turn 1-Car Garage into 2-Car

Actually, the joke is, we have a three-car garage. But last winter when The Ex-Roommate was staying with us, his stuff took up most of the third bay. No matter, it's just for storage anyway. But early this year, when we decided to swap our guest room for my office space, the first-bay was taken up by the overflow from all of that moving.

We've parked The Other Half's Volkswagen Golf in the driveway ever since. I got fed up today. Partly because Stupid Monkey Planet is coming over to help me work on my Jeep Wrangler, and I'm embarrassed that the garage looks so terrible. And the other reason is, in our neighborhood--which consists entirely of homes with three-car garages and three-car driveways--it is not uncommon to see sixteen to twenty cars parked outside, just in the four houses across from and adjacent to our house. It looks like a friggin' parking lot, and I don't like adding to it.

Still, it wasn't easy. We have a vanity that was removed from the guest room, and won't fit in the new room. We had tons of The Ex-Roomate's stuff that still populated the guest room. And we had 10 years worth of accumulated stuff in two closets to deal with. My first notion was to haul a bunch of stuff to Goodwill. Instead, SafeNest called, looking for donations. So, we boxed up a bunch of the clothing items and left them on the stoop.

Next, I piled a curbload of stuff out front with a "take me, I'm free!" sign, and had 99% of that stuff taken in about 10 minutes. More stuff in the garbage, and (unfortunately), the rest piled around the edges, and especially the now STUFFED third bay. But as the evidence shows, I now have both our cars in the garage. Whoopee!!!

Now, it is time for the real work to begin. . .fixing the Jeep. Ugh. At least I enjoy the Monkey's company, even if I detest working on cars!