Organizing the Garage

I am blessed by being married to a genius.  It's a running joke in our household, really: how smart my husband is.  He's a mechanical engineer, and those guys are handy to have around!  They're so capable.

My husband has few areas of weakness, but he'd admit that one of them is organization. Part of that is his brilliance: his mind is so good he remember details from decades ago. He has never, not once, used a planner, list, organizer, or calendar.  He doesn't see the point...whereas I depend on my plans and lists and calendar to keep me on track!  We are two very different humans in that regard.

Organizing is fun for me, but the garage has always eluded me because much of it belongs to my husband.  So many tools, mysterious gadgets and gizmos, random items.  I have tidily organized all the seasonal decorations, the gardening supplies, the canning equipment, the camping supplies, the recreational equipment...but I never have organized *his* stuff in the garage because I don't know what it is! It's all so elusive!

Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, I decided that before we do any summertime projects, I would organize once and for all. My husband was off for four days. For three days (because I didn't work on the project on Sunday), he was on call to answer my questions. I learned SO MUCH!  I can now distinguish hex bolts from sheet metal bolts, hose clamps from speed clamps, punching tools from drivers, jigsaw blades from files.  I learned more about tools in the past week than I had in the past 42 years of my life.


(I can't find my "before" picture, but there was basically nothing hanging on the pegboard, and there was a 2'-tall pile of random everythings on top of the workbench. Seriously!)

And I organized every last bit of it! Every scrap!  I sorted, tossed, grouped, labeled.  It was so satisfying.

Now, at long last, my husband knows where everything is (he once famously had to go buy a tape measure because he couldn't find his tape measure!). And my children have already spent an entire afternoon at the workbenches, building medieval tools from duct tape and PVC pipe, while I worked in the flower beds.  "The garage is so great!" they enthused.  And when they were done, it was quick and easy for us to tidy up because the garage finally follows my rule: a place for everything and everything in its place.



Sigh. So much better!


(We also got rid of all the random paints we no longer needed!)

So now I've moved on to painting the dining room furniture (while listening to Middlemarch on Audible). It feels so good to work on projects in an organized, tidy space.  At last!!