My garage is not clean. I should probably work on that.
The last time I tried to clean the garage, I was amazed by some of the things I found in there.
I found some Diet Coke that expired in 2021. I found a backpack for carrying toddlers (that my youngest child outgrew before 2021.) I found my old cassette tapes (which I haven’t listened to since 2001.)
There are several boxes full of personal mementos so important that neither my wife nor I have looked at them in over fifteen years. (My boxes outnumber my wife’s boxes at least 20-1.)
There are an inordinate amount of EMPTY boxes in my garage. The lawnmower is in the garage, and so is the extra large box the lawnmower came in. Why is the lawnmower box still in the garage? It is too big to fit in the recycle bin. I guess I could break it down and cut it up into smaller pieces, but even then it would still be too much for one trip in the recycle bin. And so, it sits in the garage.
There are approximately 27 empty shoe boxes in our garage. Why? Shoe boxes can come in handy for storing various things, so whenever someone gets a new pair of shoes, the empty shoebox goes out in the garage. (You might think that 27 pairs of new shoes would be excessive, but I can guarantee to you that over his lifetime my youngest child has lost AT LEAST 54 shoes—one darn shoe at a time!)
There is one empty box that I’ve had for over 25 years. Why? Because it’s a really cool box. (It has a handle, like a briefcase!) I’ve brought it with me through several moves. I’ve never actually used this box, but someday I probably will, and on that day I’ll be glad I kept it.
To be fair, the garage was NOT empty when we moved in. The previous owners of the house left us several cases of tile that match the kitchen floor, along with a significant number of cans of grout similar to what was used when the floor was put in. There were also several unopened (and opened) cans of paint, which may or may not have matched what the walls in the living room looked like when the house was built.
But, at this point we’ve lived in the house for over fifteen years without dipping into the paint/tile/grout reserves, so I doubt they are of much use anymore…except to take up space that would otherwise be filled with even more empty boxes.
My garage is not clean. I should probably work on that.
