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The garage is a dump, and it's not my fault

November 10, 2005|Kim Ryan

I have accepted the fact that, if I want an organized household, I'll have to roll up my sleeves and take necessary action. Which really means, of course, that I will get after the kids to do something about it.

I'd like to drive the car back into the garage before the weather turns cold for good. I'm not in any shape to be moving furniture or the lawn mower or the grill and a bunch of heavy boxes, with who knows what in them.

In order to be a really good coach, I have already begun to take aggressive action by watching the TLC channel.

My favorite show is "Clean Sweep." I must have seen 15 or 20 episodes. They are basically the same show. A team of folks comes to a home and makes fun of how messy the owners keep their stuff. One of the hosts of the show blows a whistle, and maybe a hundred members of the clean sweep team arrive to haul out the junk from the house onto three separate tarps: one for things to sell, one for things to keep, and one for things to throw away.

Simply watching the show will not get your garage organized. For that, you need to take real action, which is why I started to read House and Garden while waiting in the many doctors offices I've visited lately. I have also started to watch the new Martha Stewart show. She has a team of workers who keep things organized for her.

I tried not to be a drag about how messy things were. When we first moved into the house, I could press the button from the comfort of my car, open the garage door and feel like Batman entering the Bat Cave. I loved it. We could close the garage door and be snugly inside my very own attached garage in the snowy or weather! The car would stay cool in hot weather. If it rained, the groceries could be unloaded in the dry garage. This was living!

When things got a little crowded in the rest of the house, we would put stuff in the garage. The eldest child came home from college for the summer and left a bunch of her stuff when she returned to school. Things got even worse when my dresser, a chest and armoire got relocated to the garage. We had to make room in the house for all my equipment: oxygen tanks, a compressor, a suction machine and tons of boxes of trach care kits, a wheel chair, a walker and a nebulizer.

The youngest child recently tried to help her dad work on things. They followed the formula of TLC: Pile the stuff on three parts of the driveway: sell, trash, and keep. Passersby asked if we were having a sale.

In their exuberance, the little one and her father managed to condense stuff and throw out so much that folks thought we were moving. Then the family dragged the remaining stuff back into the garage.

We still cannot use the old Bat Cave. For that I think we'll need professional help.

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