Dragons in the Garage

Wife and I spent the greater part of yesterday afternoon slaying dragons in our garage. Let me 'splain. Our current house has no unfinished basement or attic areas. This gives us very workable interior spaces, but absolutely no proper storage. The silly thing is, the garage has a pitched roof, but it was never "finished." I mean, it's "complete," but the interior has no walls, insulation, or ceiling. Only exposed beams and rafters. There SO could have been a sweet attic up there, but that never happened for a reason completely unknown to us. Fortunately there are plywood boards on the "ceiling," so we have had boxes and packing material stored up there these five years. It's hotter than hell in there, though.

Our respite-care worker came over yesterday and took Moose on an excursion to the local children's museum, which he LOVES. This gave us three solid hours to battle the garage. I think we won yesterday's initial battle, and I don't know what we would have done without the help. All of the boxes, etc. are now down and off the rafters. We saved many more boxes than we remembered, and this will be helpful. Wife did a great job of organizing where the packed boxes should go, where the "box with a specific purpose" should be kept (e.g. the computer boxes), and finally where the random empty boxes are. I need a lot of direction in this kind of thing...my mind wanders too much when packing. Must focus and kill dragons!

I am coming across things I haven't seen in about five years. This is bad. These indeed are my dragons. That's the stuff I hate dealing with: stuff from my past that I think I want to keep, but it seems strange to do so when I literally haven't opened the box during the time we lived here (many of these boxes came to me just after we moved in... "Rob, now that you have a house, get this stuff out of my basement!"). Although, I think I'm painting a worse picture than it is. When push comes to shove, there are only about 6-8 boxes out there that I need to deal with. They are sorta big, but I guess that's not so bad. It'll be far easier than writing a dissertation proposal, that's for sure.

The other thing we desperately need to do is organize things like tools, etc. These home-improvement materials are stored in two rather cluttered sections of the garage. This is another dragon I must slay (sleigh? slae? sleh?). I'm thankful for the built-in workbench and storage that we'll have in the new garage. I am also looking forward to having time to actually DO home-improvement projects more frequently. Perhaps just the act of doing those regularly will keep the place organized? Nah.

Anyhow, yesterday ended up being very successful, and I think we're winning the battles against the dragons in the garage.

Oh yeah, I have dissertation data to collect. Gosh...almost forgot about that. Oh, so THAT's the heavy weight on my back right now...oh YEEAAAH.