I WANT MY GARAGE BACK!

Recently I undertook my annual obsession and goal of being able to park my car in our garage. Every year, for the past six, maybe seven  years, I rent a large dumpster and have it delivered outside our house. Then I attack the unbelievable mountain of stuff that annually collects in the garage. Everything from kids toys that are broken or no longer being used, to my wife’s teaching materials that have accumulated since I’ve known her. Every year I look at her and ask the same question.

“Honey, is there anything in here that you absolutely, positively need?…Can’t live without?…Would cause you to die if it was thrown away?”

“Well, …Now that I think about it there is the…”

“NO!”, I scream, “THE ANSWER IS NO! YOU HAVEN’T TOUCHED THAT STUFF IN TEN YEARS!”

Then what follows is a heated discussion on why things have to be kept, or how throwing things out is a sin when they can be donated to about ten different charities (which NEVER happens) or how, if they are thrown away, ten seconds later we’ll need it, be sorry we got rid of it, and have to go out and buy a new one.

And I blame all of this on living in California.

When the house was being built for us ten years ago, the builder kept pushing us to get a three car garage setup instead of the two car garage setup we asked for. We kept insisting that three cars was way more than we needed, we didn’t want the extra expense and we just weren’t the type that would have a boat or ATV that needed the space. So we didn’t get it.

Then, shortly after moving in, we realized what the third space was really used for. It’s used for storage. You see, in California, houses don’t have basements and the newer homes that are built don’t have functional attic space either. In fact, our paperwork specifically says not to use the attic space for storage. This is all because we live in earthquake central.  So, we don’t have the storage space that the rest of the country takes for granted in their homes. Storage rentals are a booming business in the state.

We had rented storage for years and that was an extra $150 dollars a month just to store things like Christmas and Halloween decorations. It pissed me off because, even though we had the storage space, we kept accumulating more STUFF and I STILL didn’t have a garage.

So once a year I hit my saturation point and freak out about the amount of stuff we have. I know it’s a losing battle I’m fighting. With kids in the house the amount of junk accumulates even faster than before.

Even after cleaning the garage this year, I still don’t have the space to park even one of our cars in the garage.