Preparing for a Perfect World

In a perfect world, we would park at least one of our two cars in the garage, because that is what people are supposed to do when they have 2-car garages. However, we don't have either of our cars in the garage, because there is no space for them. In fact, it is almost impossible to walk through the garage well enough to check the mail.

In a perfect world, our garage would be efficiently organized. Everything would have a designated place and everything would be IN that place. For over twenty years, we've tried repeatedly to organize our stuff. Really. We use containers and boxes and labels and shelf systems. Unfortunately, many of them are either empty or filled with stuff we plan to "go through later."

In a perfect world, we would regularly re-organize the contents of the garage, making sure to either throw away, recycle, sell or give away items we haven't used for two to three years. Ha. Usually, our re-organizing means that we pick up hard-to-reach items from one pile and put them on the top of a different pile we can see better.

This summer, we are, at last, taking steps to tame the monster that is our garage by having our old 12-inch deep cabinets ripped out and new 24-inch deep cabinets installed. We hired a company that specializes in garage systems to design a plan just for our space, to install it in one afternoon, and to haul away the old cabinets. A couple of weeks ago, the plan was designed, and workmen will be coming this Tuesday to help us create our more perfect garage! This morning, Sunday, we picked up a 16-foot long moving truck and brought it home to use for storage for a few days. We all worked hard for many hours to move most of the stuff and junk from the garage to the truck. Tomorrow, we'll have to move the rest and clear everything else out of the way, because on Tuesday, workers will transform our ridiculously inefficient hodge-podge of a storage "system" to a more perfect one, so that we - and all our neighbors - will finally breathe a collective sigh of relief. At least, that's our hope. It's very exciting.