GARAGE TRANSFORMED

Last post was a good old fashioned 'BEFORE' picture.

You can review it here: Insights from a Garage

I opened up all the dirty laundry that was hanging out in this 

little bitty shack behind our house.

Then I gloated a little bit about how trans-formative a change it has been.

This post is all about the 'AFTER'.

Who doesn't love a good before and after?

You've seen the mess:

BEFORE

And so you might be expecting to see a complete and utter re-do-

where everything is different.

Where the life that existed 'before' is completely over-hauled and off-set by several thousand dollars of purchases or plastic surgery or weeks of intensive exercise. 

Isn't that what a good makeover show will do?

Allow you to get rid of your life and replace it with someone else's?

AMIRIGHT?
I don't think so.

The big reveal.....AFTER!

At least...that's not what you'll see here.

We didn't buy new furniture or remake our lives with more stuff in this transformation.

We didn't become butterflies from caterpillars.

We are already enough-we don't need to be someone 
completely different or inhabit a whole new land of stuff to prove that.

There were a few trips to Lowe's Home Improvement 
but we had almost all the containers that we needed.

Sit with that for a sec...under all that pile of dysfunction

WE HAD WHAT WE NEEDED ALL ALONG.

It was already there, 
waiting to be uncovered or put into it's actual, right place.

Am I totally on drugs to think that this is such a good metaphor for living a whole life?

The last time we had a live Christmas tree was B.C. (Before Children)

The first day of the garage weekend cleanout weekend, we pulled everything out of the garage.

We split it into 3 piles:  trash, sell, and keep.

Our current yard is a tenth of an acre.  Approx. a tenth of that is grass.  

The trash pile was easy to agree on.

The pile to sell or get rid of in a different way was harder.

That required quite a bit of negotiation.

We owned a lot of stuff.

Some of it was valuable-but only valuable to someone else.

Motorcycle helmet? No longer needed.

Rock climbing gear? Haven't used in 16 years.

Cool strings of lights with hearts on them ? Still in the package.

We had to assign a value to the item and then try and sell it.

Some of it did not sell.

This stuff was heavy.

It needed to go.

There was real risk of it settling back into some new nook or cranny
 if we didn't have a plan.

We agreed on a timeline...
the stuff that didn't sell was donated to our church's youth group
 who was having a yard sale.

We have a lot of need to strap things down and hang things up.....

Now onto the stuff that we decided to keep.

We agreed that it is useful and necessary.

But....there was a lot of it.

How do we put that back in so that we can actually use it?

How can we help this space work for us 
instead of maneuvering around things constantly.

Everything has a place

This took most of the second day.

And some fiddling.

But the things we need and use most often (bikes, tools)

are handy.

The things that we only use occasionally 
(golf clubs, camping gear) 
are stored away.

No more random piles of screws, nails, bolts, hooks.  They live in this handy containers.

We grouped like with like.

So...all the tools are with similar tools 
(hammers together, screw drivers, ratchets).

Also, tools for similar projects are together-
painting supplies are in one area, 
electrical work in another.

Fuses and cables and cord-OH MY!

And labels are on many things.  
Labels to remind us where things go so we don't have to try 
and hold the pattern in our tired brains. 
Labels to remind us what we have 
and what we don't.
Labels so that we can understand the system and continue it. 

Calling a thing what it is, keeps it in it's place.

Our garage is useful now.  It's not just a thing that we have to carry around or fill up with stuff.  I keep wondering..how did I get this life that is so beautiful?  And also...how much more beautiful this life is when I prepare for the beauty.

Chairs for soccer and room for a little bit of beauty