Clean Up Aisle One

Things are about to get real folks- let me warn you in advance.  While I was busy showing you all the hard work we've been doing the first 6 months of living in this house, I've been hiding our dirty little secret- the garage.  

When we first moved in we thought- three whole garage stalls?  What are we ever going to do with all that space? And then we found the answer- fill them with useless crap and garbage.

Bikes, Trikes, Strollers and a bunch of lawn and yard tools

A bunch of cardboard boxes for painting, broken tiles stacked up from when Bath Crashers had to come back and re-tile the floor, and a wall that I'm certain held a dart board for the previous owners.

Sawdust, old shelves and cupboards waiting for a dumpster, scrap wood, 2 lawn mowers (one that functions and one that doesn't.)

Nearly falling out the front.

 Clearly it needed to be cleaned.  No one was denying that.  But with all the hard work going on in the inside of the house, it seemed silly to waste time cleaning the garage, as we would just make it messy again.  But finally, after a panicked moment when I literally lost my 3 year old child in the filth, it was time to take action. 

The major feat was organizing. We've learned over the years that 50% of home improvement is having the right tools for the job, and we've certainly collected our share of tools over the years.  It's always been a complete mess to find the tool that we need when we need it though, so we organized by the project type.  We found a couple of dollar bin buckets, and a few more on sale at Home Depot and labeled them "Electrical," "Plumbing," "Woodworking", "Tile & Grout", etc...

 And the rest of the more general tools hang on the board so that we can find them quickly.

 It still looks pretty messy with all this wood hanging out, but any wood worker knows that the key to cheaper projects is having a good scrap pile.

And once all the little things had a place, the floor cleaned up pretty quickly.  Well... relatively speaking.  It was pretty much an all day project.

Not bad for now.  I have a 5 year dream that includes more concealed storage, painting over all the wall patch on the walls, and even applying garage floor epoxy for a beautiful and durable workshop flooring like this:

But in the mean time I'll settle for a clear walk way from my car to the service door.  Some day...