Nancy Drew Mystery in the Garage

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

John Muir was speaking of the Sierras, but he could have been referring to my remodeling plans. As I keep reminding my husband, we need to look on this as an opportunity to simplify. Our new mantra is "If we had to move, would we take it with us?". It's actually very freeing.

It all started with two plumbing leaks last summer. We decided to re-pipe our condo, and since that requires opening up walls, it was a good opportunity to make a few more changes we had been contemplating. Unfortunately, that means no room will be untouched, which means we need to store most everything in the garage, so . . . we spent half of Saturday cleaning the garage.

By US standards, our garage is not bad; it's a two-car garage, and we park two cars in it. I enticed Dave with the thought we could do the purging an hour at a time. The first hour we pulled down empty electronics boxes from the rafters - Dave insists we keep the box for every piece of electronics that we own. After 21 years, there were quite a few for things we no longer had. Those were broken down and went into the recycling bin. The others will come in handy to store our electronics during the remodel (Dave was quite pleased to hear me say "You were right, saving these boxes did come in handy." He asked me to repeat it several times.)

There were some unexpected finds - like the termites that had eaten the inside of one of the cardboard boxes. So now the termite inspector comes Thursday. That was Day 1 of the garage purge.

Day 2 we found the household hazardous waste we had been saving to "someday" take to a collection day. Old paint, oil, and chemicals. I made the appointment and dropped off our small box Saturday. We also had a case of unopened 20/50 weight oil that was for 2 cars ago. The easiest solution was to add it to the household hazardous waste, but I hate to add something to the waste stream that is still usable. Turns out the hazardous waste site has a special place for unopened materials - they invite the public to come and take what they need, and I was told engine oil is usually snapped up. Another item off my list!

Then there was the box of 36 (now vintage) Nancy Drew books. I loved these books as a girl, and was saving them for the daughter I never had. It was time to let them go. They're now on e-Bay. Five bids already, and I'm donating 15% of the sale price to Habitat for Humanity (if you're interested - search e-Bay for "Nancy Drew books - lot of 36").

On his part, Dave cashed in the two boxes of copper pennies he'd been saving forever. After a trip to the bank, he's now $87 richer from those 8700 pennies. Now he just needs to deal with the stash he has in his closet. Then he can take me out for that mojito he promised me.

There were quite a few boxes with Styrofoam packing peanuts. Those I took to our local AIM mailing center; they are happy to re-use the peanuts.

I was feeling quite pleased with my efforts to keep what I could out of the waste stream, so I felt a treat was in order. Michael Pollan (Food Rules: An Eater's Manual) would not be happy, but I enjoyed my Peeps. And the garage has empty space.