Ok, I realize that doesn't sound overly exciting, but trust me, it is! No matter how cluttered other areas were, the one thing I always made sure of was that I could park my car in the garage, when the girls were younger it was absolutely essential since I would come home, they'd be asleep, I'd close the garage door, open the car windows, leave the door between house & garage open, and go get stuff done while they napped. And well, I'm just spoiled that way, it means the steering wheel doesn't burn my hands in the summer, I don't have to scrape windows in the winter . . . etc.
But then last summer, dh bought a new riding lawn mower. A REALLY LARGE riding lawn mower & "temporarily" parked it where my car was supposed to be. I sorted through as much as I could, told dh, I needed his help carrying stuff & going through HIS stuff, to make room for the lawn mower in the "storage" side of the garage. He never had time . . . ALL SUMMER I dealt with so hot it burned my fingers steering wheel, and kids needing me to buckle seat belts so they didn't burn themselves on the metal part and having to run the a/c at full blast to get all that heat gone . . . and as we came into fall/winter, I said PLEASE go through stuff w/ me, so I can park in the garage before it snows, and then it snowed . . . and I was dealing w/ frosty windows, and the girls' water bottles being frozen solid and . . . finally dh said he'd help me clear stuff out on our anniversary weekend. And then it rained, and I just couldn't find the . . . something, to try to arrange things w/o being able to pull it out into the driveway & sort things out. But I DID point out his pile (that he ignored LOL), and ask him to help me carry a couple really big boxes to the basement (which he did). And we filled the back of his minivan with stuff he needed to take to the shop. So then I started working through stuff on nice-ish days, and I freecycled some stuff, and gave some more stuff to friends, and added to the "dh needs to go through this stuff" pile, and last weekend I sent some stuff to my parents' house, and yesterday he was actually home in the afternoon and I said PLEASE go through your pile, and he went through part of it, and took another load up to the shop, and moved the lawn mower into the corner I'd cleared for it. Today I went through the stuff that was hiding behind the lawn mower, and moved some other stuff around and got it to the point where the ONLY thing keeping me from parking in the garage was the still rather large pile of "stuff for dh to go through". And it was just SO close . . . so I squeezed things together where the girls' bikes are, and piled dh's boxes there, at this point, w/ those boxes where they are, it's hard for me to open the driver door, but it is IN the garage! Dh has assured me that he'll go through more stuff tonight, which I won't totally believe until the girls are asleep & he's still awake (he has this tendency to fall asleep before they do on the nights I've asked him to help me w/ something), but hopefully he will, and then I can easily park in the garage.
The trash can is the closest it's ever been to overflowing (thankfully it goes out tonight) and one of the recycle bins IS overflowing (and those were just emptied this morning, so they have another week before they go out, but the way the wind blows, we seem to collect recycle bins (and they're not marked so we have no way to return them to their owners) so we have THREE of them, so we'll survive. And I've got more stuff listed on freecycle that people will hopefully take. And there's still some stuff that a friend is going to take when she's here on Wednesday, but we have definite progress :)
What can I say, little things excite me :)
Of course, on the other hand, as soon as I parked in the garage A told me "I don't want you to park in here!" Little Miss "I Hate Change" strikes again . . . she told me it was because she likes how cold her water gets when she leaves it in the car, but I assured her it will still get cold, it just won't FREEZE. She's the same kid who was very upset when Daddy parked his lawn mower "where our car goes" last spring LOL.
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