Family Daze: The challenges of cleaning out garage Junk

Occasionally the difference between men and women astounds me.

Take, for example, the garage. Call me naïve, but I’ve always thought of a garage as a nice convenient place to store big objects like, say, a car. My husband, on the other hand, has always considered it to be more of an extra closet, the perfect place to keep everything he owns that doesn’t qualify to live inside the house. Stuff like peace-sign cement cinder blocks, wrenches, cans of motor oil, rusty nails, burned out circuit boards and eight-track tape players. In other words: junk.

Ok, I’ll admit it, we all have some junk in our lives. Even sane, logical people have things they’ll never get rid of. My friend Barb’s husband (an educated man with a Master’s degree in business) is emotionally attached to cases of sticky notes he kept from his first job twelve years ago. My friend Linda has boxes and boxes of used gift bows stored in her garage.

But, face it, you can’t go around saving everything.

So I dropped the bomb one morning over breakfast. I turned and looked my husband straight in the eye and said, "Today I’m going to clean out the garage."

He smiled at me, clearly missing the magnitude of my decision. "Why?"

"So we can get into the car each morning without running through the sprinklers," I said.

"Bu-"

"Don’t get all worked up," I said. "I’m only going to get rid of all the stuff we don’t need anymore. I saw it on a talk show."

"A talk show?"

I hadn’t wanted him to know about this part actually, but I had seen this idea on a talk show. I had started watching it thinking that cleaning, along with transvestite cross-dressers and people who marry barnyard animals, is a topic I could make fun of. But halfway through the show, when they started discussing how de-cluttering your surroundings can change your life, I realized they were speaking directly to me.

"I’m just going to relocate some stuff to, well, Goodwill," I continued.

"What stuff? MY stuff?"

I could see he wasn’t ready for the full impact so I proceeded slowly.

"Oh, just a few things we don’t need anymore. Like maybe the five VCR’s that haven’t worked since sometime in 1987, and the disco ball with the black light."

I could tell by the way he was staring at me that this wasn’t going to be easy. Clearly, if I wanted to make any sort of progress, I’d have to have a better plan.

So I called my friend Julie, the only person I knew who could fit two entire cars into her garage.

"How do you do it?" I asked her. "How do you keep your garage so clean?"

"Baby steps," she said simply. "Start with the less obvious junk and gradually work it around the garage towards the trunk of your car. After about three days, toss it in. By the time you get rid of it, he won’t even notice it’s gone."

Now a good person would think, "Wait a minute! This is sneaky and just plain wrong. I can’t go around manipulating people’s property this way.

A medium-good person would think, "Well, I feel bad but, hey, something has to be done."

Me, I waited until my husband went to work and moved his spare manual lawn mower over by water softener. Then I scooted his box of fishing lures towards the water heater and started dispersing old computer parts on the shelves above the door.

However, once I got started I discovered two particular drawbacks to this system that I hadn’t thought of. The first is that, at this rate, the garage would be cleared sometime 2076 and I’d be too old to enjoy it. The second is that deep down sneaking around this way just feels, well, wrong.

That said, I want you to know I did discover one enormous perk: by rearranging his junk I had accidentally created more space in the garage. Not enough to park a car, mind you. But enough to hold, say, a nice big box of maternity clothes, all of my college textbooks, and a pair of my old favorite Birkenstocks.

Not that I plan on keeping them or anything.