Garage Clean Out

Sorry I fell off the wagon there for a few days. You see, we have the in-laws coming for a visit this weekend, and I got all wrapped up in doing some things around the 'Hampton to get ready. Nothing like a MIL to motivate you to clean your house.

Or your garage.

Speaking of -- does anyone keep their garage clean?

We don't. I think it's because it's the one area of our house that I kind of leave to Jim for cleaning . . . and if you've ever seen his side of our bed or his side of our closet, you know how 'clean' our garage stays. (Translation: not that clean.)

About once a year, I get to the point where I can't take it any more. The driveway toys are too dirty, the area where we allow junk to collect has become so overrun with junk we can't use it any more, and the yard equipment has leaked out into parking areas and must be moved to get to bikes. The clutter and the misplaced junk in our garage starts to wear me down, and I have to call for a 'Garage Clean Out' day in our household.

Did I mention we have a 2 car garage and only park on one side? That should tell you the amount of junk that piles up in a year's time. It's nuts.

The last time we did this, look how little Little was . . .

Now about 15 months have passed, and we tackled the job again. This time was a lot more 'fun' -- if you can call garage clean out fun. Both of the girls are old enough to help. And no doubt about it: we put them to work. Everyone worked hard on this project.

Little washed the outside toys.

Daddy hung up big hooks so we could get our um-teen million strollers off the floor. (We have, seriously, a fleet of strollers . . . last count, we had 6.)

And Big walked around with my camera, documenting everything in our house for insurance purposes. Nothing like giving your 4 year old the camera to play with . . . she had a blast and just walking around and shooting everything she saw. Literally.

(That last one is play food from her kitchen, I promise.)

You always find crazy stuff doing this kind of clean out. Big uncovered something I think Daddy wore for Halloween once, and she also managed to find all of her 'swimming' Barbies buried among the pool and beach gear. Little --well, she's so fun. Anything she found was a treasure . . . including Daddy's stud finder, which she called her 'beeper'.

And then there were the paint cans. The lovely woman that lived here before us left us a bunch of junk in our garage in our (at that time) unfinished basement. We had our agent call her agent a BUNCH of times to request that she clean it up before closing, but the only thing she came back and actually got was the darling little 2-seater BMW that sat in our garage until literally a few hours before the papers were signed. The rest of her junk was left for us to deal with. Figures.

The paint cans have been the bain (bane?) of my existence . . . when it comes to the garage, at least. The previous owner left us two cabinets full of partially used -- even full! -- cans of paint. Because we all know that I wanted to use her old, smelly paint to touch up my walls that I had repainted entirely with much better colors within days of our house closing. And because we all know how easy it is to get rid of paint. Yeah, just stick it in the garage to be picked up on Monday.

Um. Nope. It's such a royal pain to get rid of paint. If you have thrown your own cans away in the garbage, I urge you to Google the proper way to dispose of it.

Here -- look at this craziness.

After 3 years of living with this in our garage cabinets, I've now left Jim in charge of getting rid of the paint. And he often follows up on projects like that about as well as he keeps the garage clean.

Something tells me that my paint pyramid tower might still be standing where it is the next time we go to clean out the garage, sometime in 2011.

Anyway, nothing but a good old family clean out going on around here. My motivation has spilled out into the main floors of our house . . . cleaning and putting away my mom's china in our china cabinet, hanging up and rearranging photos on our walls, etc. Like I said, nothing like the visit of family to give you the kick in the pants you need to actually get stuff done around your house.