Real life ought to march on through the garage a little more often … my daughter and I set Wee Jamie in the middle of his playmat on the big double bed in my bedroom Saturday morning and went to tackle the garage … Hey, why does a nice single woman of advanced years like you need a double bed?! Hey, I want my half IN THE MIDDLE!! So there! Between Small Doggie wanting to be at one quadrant under the covers on cold nights, and Isabelle the Not-Tightly-Wrapped-Siamese wanting another quadrant for herself, I am lucky to be able to claim the middle sector.

Anyway, the garage needs a good turn-out and reorganization of the contents, what with all the … umm… stuff in it. There’s a boxed high chair, a play table for Wee Jamie, and a little work desk with chair when he ages into the needs for it, a couple of other items for him when he is slightly older, some stuff that he has grown out of which needs to be trucked to a friend of ours with an incipient grandchild who will need it, a few things saved against the eventual kitchen reno, another bunch of construction materials which need to be safely organized and stashed away, a whole lotta tools also in crying need of an organization … hey, we had almost a dozen foam and fiber disposable paint brushes, knocking around the inner recesses of the garage! Really, the garage had descended all unknowing into the state where it was just simpler to buy another one, rather than go on an expedition searching for it.

Three unopened tubes of various construction calk. Well, now that is safely sorted into a new wheeled tool-box, with simply everything inside it…

My daughter did a run to Goodwill yesterday, another one today. And consigned a couple of things to the trash can or the curb, for whoever wants them. We went right back to it this morning, ruefully conceding that this will be a project which will consume most of the next week, perhaps the next weekend as well, as we have only got as far as the corner with the workbench, a quarter of one wall and the niche where the freezer and the hot water heater are. But at least now the corner with the tool bench is organized, and all the chargers for various battery-operated tools are set up and charging, and the tools themselves hung neatly in a row on the wall. A large part of the problem is that there is a lot of furniture set aside for my daughter’s future independent establishment, several boxed items meant in the near future for Wee Jamie – like the little toddler-sized desk and chair – and some like the porcelain farmhouse sink intended for my eventual kitchen reno. There are also lengths of baseboard, beadboard, architectural trim and a box of vinyl flooring to be used in the near future on other renovation projects. All must be re-staged in a more space-saving mode, so that I can get my car back into the garage, once it is ransomed from the paint and body shop, which had it to work on over the holidays, after the misadventure with the hood coming loose and smashing into the windshield and roof two months ago.

And I used to think that it was a good thing I wasn’t moving every year, or three years or so. The drastic thinning of possessions which must happen with families who have lived in the same house for a hundred years or more doesn’t really bear thinking about.