First, an intro. I recently moved into a new place, previously occupied by my brother. He moved into a bigger place, and me moving here kinda worked perfectly for both of us. The best part, i'm moving from a 1 car garage to a 2 car. It's roughly 21' deep (little more) and almost 24' wide at the widest point. One of walls isn't straight, but you'll see the pics. High-ish ceiling, too! There's only one problem, this is the garage:
yeah, it's pretty messy. While moving and working full time (and dealing with 2 kids), my brother and sister in law were expecting a child. I say 'were expecting' because it's born now (hooray!). To relieve some of their stress, i said don't worry about cleaning up, just leave what you don't want and i'll get rid of it.
Some of this stuff is mine, like the compressor
And enough 3M sandpaper to strip an old, old wooden ship:
but a lot of these things were left behind (including the cat. his name is charlie and he's awesome):
It's also too bad i'm not a fan of beer:
The lighting situation isn't particularly great. the opener has 2 bulbs, one burned out, the other lame, and the 2 ceiling outlets had no bulbs. I found 2 in the mess and stuck them in (after finding a cooler to use as a ladder, also half buried in the garage):
One 75 watt incandescent, and a spotlight of some sort. Also discovered during daytime, the door doesn't really seal. like, at all:
I'll have to fix that at some point...
And that's basically where I start. all the stuff left behind means i can't start with an empty, fresh garage, but that's not a huge issue i suppose. Step one will have to be an inventory of all the stuff in here, and a quick cleanup. Step 2 will be plan building. I have big plans already. Big, big plans. As much as i LOVE getting ahead of my self, step 1 has to happen first. The problem is i work long hours, get home around dinner, spend family time with kid 1 and a pregnant SWMBO until kid 1 goes to bed, then have like an hour or 2 before i have to go to sleep for the next work day, so incremental progress is the name of the game here. So i have a filthy garage, not very much light, not very much time, no energy at all, my leg hurts, i can't feel part of my right hand, it's dark out and i'm wearing sunglasses. time to get cleaning!
I have no way to play music other than pandora on my phone (no wifi yet, wireless router still at old place), but i do have caffeinated motivation:
First off is a nice cabinet by the door. one of 3, these have fronts that swing open:
Well, nothing much in there. cleaning is easy! next up, i need floor space to put stuff. not like i need to re-clutter, but i need to stage stuff for organization. How about right under the cabinet:
First up for organization, that cooler i used as a step stool:
Why is it so heavy?
OH... Guess i'll put that in the beer area and get to it later... How about the stuff i know is going to get moved? Yeah, like that kid slide dealy... oh right, it takes up all the space, now i need more floor space...
By now i'm losing focus on the task at hand (organizing the junk) and get distracted by all the dirt and leaves, so i found a broom (elsewhere in the pile) and started sweeping. here's how that went:
1: sweep some stuff
2: drink mountain dew
3: sweep some more
4: go inside and 'release' some of the previous mountain dew.
5: go back outside, and realize i can't find the broom
6: look around, find another broom, but decide to look for the one I had before.
7: waste lots of time before realizing that WAS the broom i was using before.
8: Go back to step 1
While moving the beer to be with another grouping (flock? pack?) of beer, i discovered it's not all beer!:
That's right, 9 bottles of root beer! i love root beer! Screw you, empty can of mountain dew!
Hello, awesome mug!
Around this time it was bed time for me. here's the progress:
Night 1 is a success! That was monday night. I also worked tuesday through friday nights, but until today i didn't have a camera chip reader (i lose things. also i'm dumb. remember the broom?) so there is more coming but maybe not immediately as i have to upload and write up and stuff... I will probably post different days in different posts. I need to get this as clean as possible because in a few days we go back to new york, to return a week and a half later with literally every thing we own. This garage will be used as the staging area when the moving truck gets here, so it needs to be free of this crap first...