The shelves, before and after

Finally it's the weekend, which means I can get back to work on the garage. It's taking me so much longer than I expected!

Today I took three trips to the dump and one to Goodwill, getting rid of eight or nine bags of stuff in all. There's more to go, but I was too embarrassed to go to the dump again. It'll keep.

I wanted to accomplish something today that would make me feel like I'm actually making progress. So I focused on the brick-and-board shelves that used to hold gardening stuff.

I'd never stained wood before, at least not that I recall, and I was a bit intimidated. I don't know why. It was ludicrously simple. I stained the table in the back corner of the garage first, and it was not only easy but I thought it looked really good immediately.

Of course everything's easy if you do a sloppy job. I have low standards.

I let the boards dry for a few hours while I worked in the yard and ran errands (in that order, so I probably frightened some people with my appearance). Then I stacked the bricks, making sure that each pair was the same height since the bricks were a mixture of new pavers and very old bricks, some of them apparently handmade.

It looked good when done, and I had a few fun minutes decorating it. All the stuff on the shelves was already in the garage, incidentally. This might be a good time to mention that my grandmother was an antique dealer for decades. Me and my brother and all our cousins grew up helping move furniture, and along the way we absorbed a lot of knowledge and interest in antiques. Most of the stuff on the shelves, though, was my mother's.

Tomorrow I'll arrange more furniture, sweep the garage out, and make some decisions about what to do with all those boxes of Christmas decorations. And if I have time, I'll hit the antique shops. I need some gadgets.

Preparing for paint

I had to proctor the ACT this morning, so I didn't get to work on the garage until late afternoon after that and errands. When I'm away from home, I think about the garage and remember it as being mostly empty. Then I come home and open the garage door.

Today I wasn't really sure what to work on. I only had a few hours between getting home and going back out (in, like, five minutes; type faster!) so I knew I couldn't start painting. After poking around for a while I decided I'd clear off the brick-and-board shelves so I could stain the boards.

But somehow, after moving everything off the boards, sorting through it and pitching a few things, and propping the boards outside to sweep clean later, I started moving everything into the middle of the garage. I didn't do much sorting, just hauled stuff away from the walls.

I kept finding things I'd forgotten I owned, including a plastic bin full of stuff I thought had been lost in the move. Some phrases don't get uttered often on this planet, but I added one to the tally of, "Hey, there's my niddy-noddy!"

After moving everything, I got the broom and started sweeping cobwebs off the walls. I wish I'd swept the kitchen floor first--it really needs it, but no way am I putting that broom back in the house now. I'll buy a new house broom and keep this one in the garage from now on. Because spiderwebs, of course. Lots and lots of them.

As I swept, I noticed that whoever built the garage did a bit of a slipshod job. There are a lot of too-long nails poking through, a lot of mismatched bits of wood. In short, it looks like I built it myself. In one corner etched into the concrete floor is "Carly Rae '07." I'm pretty sure that "Call Me Maybe" singer never lived in this house, though.

And if anyone asks, that was 1907, okay? Pretty soon, I hope, it will start to look like it. I keep noticing things I want to steampunk up after I finish the heavy lifting of painting, cleaning, and sorting. That'll be the fun part.