Garage Makeover

A week ago, out of frustration Mr. Sloth said, "You know what I want for my birthday? I want a usable garage."  Well that caught my attention. "Really? Do I have a budget? Like, can I hire someone?", I eagerly pressed.  I don't recall he actual response but to my intrigued ears he seemed to be saying  "Do what you need to do" playing out like a scene from the Wedding at Cana. A few days have passed as I brainstormed what to do, but no real plans. Then the kids and I came home from Rooster's  "Amazing Athletes" class and I parked the van perpendicular at the end of the driveway so the kids could ride bike and not be tempted to go in the street and I, I was going to use the leaf blower on the garage.

Have I ever used it? Nope. Did I know how to start it? Nope. Were the kids hungry and want lunch? Yep. I started the oven to reheat left over pizza from Demands birthday but gratefully the boys wanted theirs cold so they were content. While Demand and I waited for our pizza to heat up I emptied the garage of bikes and tried to figure out the leaf blower. After many texts to Obscure I still couldn't get it going. It would have to wait. Then Mr. Sloth came home for lunch and started it up for me. My word that is one fun tool.  Somehow tons of grass had gotten into our garage along with years of dust, dirt, sand, cobwebs and who knows what else. It was a good clean start. I'll do it a few more times before the project is done I'm sure but it was enough of a boost to really get me started on this project.

It was time for King and Rooster to nap. Rooster goes down easy if I'm in the room with him. Sometimes I nap too other times I read or do work online. I had my minimalist book and Pinterest as my friends. As I pinned away Obscure would shoot me an idea or two over text, most of which were beyond awesome.  Once Rooster was asleep I got back to work. This time I started emptying all the shelves I could and making piles across the garage including most of all, "Things to leave the house". Plans have become more solid the more I Pinterest and the more I clean and purge.  There are four stages.

1) Purge and Clean. You can't organize unless you know what you have so we're getting rid of what we can and then organizing according to categories and then I can't decide how to store things.

2) Paint. We're painting the walls and I'm renting a sprayer.  No question about it. Not 100% sure on the colors right now but we are mostly likely going to do white walls with black door and doorframe because that door gets disgusting.

3) Organize. Once we know what we need to store and the walls are painted we can arranged shelving accordingly and get better feel for what we need. (this will by far be the best part)

4) Paint. Once all the wall storage is up we are going to paint the floor. It will take two steps as I don't know what we're going to do with everything while the paint dries.

5)  Finally storage solutions and organizing.


Here is a starter list of projects

-paint walls
-paint floor
-screen for the garage door so Mr. Sloth can work without battling Minnesota Mosquitoes.
-shelving that will separate the garage into two areas.

We have a lot of organizing material all ready which is nice we just haven't had the time to purge and start over.

Here are some humbling before pictures. Keep in mind a lot of this is due to the extreme cold of the past winter keeping us from stepping foot in this garage.

This corner is supposed to be Mr. Sloths work area. I don't see why he thinks it's unusable.

This is where the bulk of our storage rests right now.  Things have just gotten thrown somewhere as needed instead of having a designated place.

Yard tool area, not bad but could be better.

Lifted the rug up to see how dirty it really is in there. Eww.

This is after I used the leaf blower, notice the difference?

Already looking better.

I have more pictures to take already as I've cleared most of the shelves and taking the shelving down off the wall. Next step is to finish clearing the walls and paint them.