"I got a garage door opener. It can't close... just open."
--- Stephen Wright, American comedian
For a place I don't actually live in, my garage seems to require an awful lot of attention.
My wife Susan can tell you that anyplace where I actually hang out requires a lot of maintenance. The upholstery on my La-Z-Boy looks like I've towed it behind a 4X4 during an off-road excursion. It's constantly surrounded by debris (cups, wrappers, remotes, adrenaline hypos...). There might be a fortune in loose change buried in the cushions, but no one's got the nerve to fish around down there... new life may have developed and it's unlikely to be friendly. The area around my side of the bed is a minefield of books, earbuds, and portable electronic devices; no one's going to be able to murder me in my sleep without incurring some nasty paper cuts and inadvertently emailing a couple of people.
But I don't spend a lot of time in my garage. I don't use it for a rec room (that would be my La-Z-Boy) or a workshop (that would be a Chuck Thornton from an alternate universe). I keep my cars in there, but I don't work on my cars... I have to consult the owner's manual to pop the hood, and after seeing what lies beneath it, I usually end up in a fetal position back in the La-Z-Boy. Bottom line: I think of my garage as essentially an extra couple of doors I pass through on the road between my home and the outside world.
Give me some credit, though: my two-car garage actually contains two cars. While driving through my neighborhood, I've seen garages that have been turned into warehouses for surplus goods that will no longer fit in the house, with the cars dispossessed to the driveway or curb. Don't give me too much credit, though. It's not that I don't collect junk in my garage; it's just that I've been creative in shoving and stacking it up against the walls so the cars can still fit inside and the driver can still enter and exit the car through a window, as long as he greases up first.
But lately, my garage has been crying for attention as the non-auto paraphernalia has continued to grow. My garage, by design, houses our water heater and washer and dryer. In addition to the two cars, it also contains:
two 4'x6' shelf units that contain 45 boxes full of comic books;
another shelf unit that holds Christmas decorations and camping equipment;
a few stacks of plastic totes and cardboard boxes containing books;
a box containing a DishTV satellite dish that was accidentally sent to me and that the company didn't want back;
my lawn mower;
a wheeled tool chest containing many tools of which I know neither the name nor function;
a wheeled wire shelving unit that looks like it was made out of supermarket shopping carts, and holds laundry supplies and other miscellaneous items;
two trash bins (one for recyclables and one for the trashier trash);
ten 14-foot-long pieces of 2x2 lumber left over from when our backyard patio overhang was rebuilt;
the notorious and unusable automobile rooftop carrier that was discovered to be remarkably aerodynamic (you can read about it here);
a brand new tire for our Corolla, without the wheel, that I have no idea how we obtained;
an old dining table with chairs;
another old dining table with no chairs;
a stack of cardboard boxes containing cables for a variety of electronic devices, most of them extinct;
a few tool boxes inherited from my dad and grandfather;
four ladders, two of which I'll dare to climb;
a wheeled fertilizer spreader;
an old metal filing cabinet;
an extra TV;
a black-widow hatchery;
and some more stuff that I either can't recall or haven't yet discovered.
As you've probably gathered, something's got to give. Many have suggested that I rent some space at one of the many storage complexes that seem to have sprung up like mushrooms along the side of the freeway and beneath urban underpasses. But my dad would roll over in his grave at the idea of paying somebody to store our junk... he would have sooner erected a small city of aluminum storage sheds in our back yard before renting an off-site storage unit. And I share that same heart-felt solid-as-a-rock conviction.
Not that it stopped me from renting a storage unit. The battle between pragmatism and genetically-encoded conviction had actually been waged months ago, when my son Sam graduated college and moved back into our Santa Clarita home, bringing with him an apartment's worth of furnishings. Pragmatism won that day; I rented a storage unit to hold all the furniture and stuff Sam brought back with him. So on the front once occupied by the Thornton conviction against non-resident rental, there's nothing but scorched earth. Sorry, Dad.
Still, my strategy is to avoid putting any of my stuff in the storage unit. I don't want go down that road, only to have Sam find his own place, start emptying the unit, and invoke a "finders keepers" clause that I missed in the fine print. Besides, as long as the storage unit is Sam-dedicated, I can point in the direction of Sam's room when my dad's disgruntled spirit visits at night.
At any rate, I decided it was time for some serious garage reorganization. My approach was simple. Instead of viewing my garage as a floor on which to stack things, I looked at it as a box, with walls and a ceiling that could be used to hang all sorts of stuff. Sue liked the "box" idea, and immediately started thinking outside of it... way outside of it... like out at the local landfill. So between the dual approaches of perching and pitching, we came up with a plan.
When I visited my brother in Virginia last year, he had shown me how his garage was organized using a system of wall-mounted slotted panels in which all sorts of hooks and shelves and baskets and other doohickeys could be easily installed. The entire back wall of his garage was covered by these panels, and I was very impressed by how sharp and organized it all looked. Of course, compared to my garage, my brother's is the Taj Mahal of suburban storage. It's roomy and immaculate and completely spider-free, I think because the rent is too high. Also, the valet parking adds a touch of class.
After seeing my brother's garage, I was sold on the wall-system idea. It's manufactured by Whirlpool and marketed under the name Gladiator Garage Works. I'm sure the Whirlpool marketing people put a lot of consumer research into coming up with the name, but I'm not sure I get it. Were gladiators well-known for their storage organization skills? I've seen some gladiator movies, and there didn't seem to be much focus on where they stowed all their gear... I suppose they could have had pegboard marked with the outlines of spears, shields, swords, and the occasional enemy's head, but I don't think a tidy workshop was a gladiator trademark. I watched 300 recently, and the Spartans didn't seem particularly tidy; in fact, they seemed to leave a mess behind at their worksite. There were also a lot of dramatic battle cries throughout the movie, so I may have missed it, but I didn't see the Spartans charging into the fray screaming "A place for everything, and everything in its place!" But I'm sure the Whirlpool folks know what they're doing, and I probably would have been less likely to buy something called Fussbudget Garage Works.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton