Saturday dawned bright and beautiful - but crazy windy.  Yet another day that I wasn't able to put down my weed killer.  I mowed the lawn instead and figured since my dad just helped carry my chest freezer down to the basement, there was no time like the present to get the garage cleaned out so I can finally park my car in there.

I hadn't done much to the garage - when I first moved in I used it as sanding and painting central for kitchen cabinets.  I did park in there for part of this winter - until the door finally went wonky enough that I couldn't get it lifted open anymore.  You could've colored me surprised when I drove home from Wisconsin a bright and beautiful April afternoon and found my friends Justin and Megan just leaving after installing a new garage door and automatic opener for me.  They're the bestest friends ever.  I think Justin did most of the manual labor, but I'm sure Megan did a great job supervising.

Back to the story.  I could get the door opened, the big chest freezer was out of the way, so it was time to get the place cleaned and swept out.  I started with the important things first - getting a radio and ipod out there so I could clean to some tunes. Then I sprayed down my lawn mower - did you know that you get green sludge under there?!  And cleaned out the cooler I used for softball last week, since I had the hose out anyways.  While those were drying, I started hauling things out of the garage.  And hauled and hauled and hauled. 

Trash, recycling, bike, lawn chairs, mower....

I couldn't move everything out of the garage - my new storm doors were too heavy, the scrap aluminium will just stay until my dad takes it to the junkyard for cash, and all the scrap wood boards have a nice home leaned up against the wall.  I found some old windows - the windows in their frames, the screens and the storms.  I actually had a taker for the windows from freecycle on Sunday, so those have a new home and the trash will be filled each week with the other useless stuff - old baseboard, the old screens, etc.

Scrap soffits and aluminium, shovels, rake, sawhorse.  Isn't that workbench made out of a headboard awesome?

I moved the scrap wood to the corner in the back of the garage (upper left in the photo above).  Moved the storm doors next to the scrap wood so there's more room in the storage on the right side of the garage (in photo below).  I leaned the shovels up against the wall below and put the bike there.

Scrap wood, old paint cans, new storm doors

I'm not sure why I didn't take a picture when I was done cleaning it all out - I'll do that tomorrow and update it here.  Needless to say, it looks a lot better and I'm getting all the cardboard out to the recycling tomorrow.  Sometime in the near future I'll get some pegboard to hang up and start the actual organizing of the garage.  But, I needed a cleaned up space to start with. 

Cost = $0
Labor = heavy
Time = 1.5 hours
Spiders = endless *shudder*

Here's a question for you - if the pegboard doesn't cover up the Panther grafitti (and the Miguel was here that was behind the storm doors) should I paint?  I don't want to be mixed up in that hardcore Panther gang...