Woman Country!

This blog was originally about furnishing and decorating my house for FREE.  There's a long and very creepy story about why we don't have that house anymore that's detailed in the post called "The Bitter End" (http://freesourcefull.blogspot.com/2011/08/bitter-end.html) if you want to read about it.

Lately, this blog has been about cheap/free projects and general frugality. 

But, sometimes, I post things on this blog just because they make me happy!  Usually, this things cost me little or nothing or even made money so they fit with the general FREESOURCEFULL theme. 

This is one of those posts!

I will admit it.  I am sort of a hoarder.  And I included the "sort of" part just to make myself feel better!  My garage is the bottle neck of my life.  If I can only get it cleaned out and organized and functioning the way I need it to, it will solve many problems in my life.  Really! 

I'll spare you the explanations and excuses.  You wouldn't buy them anyway.  But do keep in mind that I had/have a staging business and also that I have emptied four storage units in the past couple of years.  So, I really HAVE made progress -- even if it doesn't look like it!

On Wednesday night, in the midst of a very busy, wall-to-wall day, I walked into the garage for something.  Well, actually, I had to climb over some stuff to get into the garage.  This photo was taken after after I cleared a path. 

I don't even remember now what it was that I went in there for.  And I don't really know how it happened.  I just started moving things.  After a while, I decided that, regardless of all the millions of other things I SHOULD have been doing, I was going to get the most done if I stayed with my muse and worked on the garage while I was on a roll. 

Several hours later, I dragged myself in the front door to find some dinner.  Two of my girls met me in the front hall and asked: "Do you know what time it is?"

"No."

It was 11:29 p.m.!  I had no idea!
But it was worth every second I had spent out there.  And it was worth starving for!

In 2002, when we added onto the house and re-oriented the garage to open to the side, I turned the previous front entry into a little bumped-out workshop.  It's about six feet deep and 20 feet wide.  My ex-husband claimed it as the only area in our girly, female-dominated house that was "HIS".  He dubbed it "Man Country". 

Well, now we're divorced and I'm well on my way to getting the worst dregs of his motor-old covered car junk out of there and making it MINE!  So it is now "WOMAN COUNTRY"!

Now that I write this, I remember the subliminal image that must have started me on my garage-cleaning.  It was this glorious magazine photo of workshop heaven which I had taped to the wall in the garage for inspiration and hope for future transformation:

Isn't it glorious?

That must have been what got me started.  I think it happened when I realized that there were shelves in the photo and I had THESE sitting by the front door on the way to the trash:

And then they just happened to be the perfect length and then one thing led to another and now, still far from OCD/Martha Stewart perfect but a vast improvement over my previous garage hell, here it is:

I haven't made the labels yet but the shelves from the top down are "Construction Materials", "Cleaning Products", "Care Care", "and Auto Repair".  Then, below the shelves, are places to hand power tool cases.  Beside the shelves to the right are extension cords, a nail and screw organizer, and other "flat" things that won't impede the door from opening. 

There's a workbench under the window.  It holds a chopsaw on top and, underneath, the shop vac and a chainsaw case.  Here a two crappy photos that,if put together, might give you an idea of what it looks like:

Here's the other side of the workshop:

It contains my beloved table saw (which I use ALL THE TIME!), lots of little drawers for small items, my fun old red magazine holders (lest ye thing I'm just a magazine hoarder, I REALLY DO go back to these magazines over and over for inspiration), and some other junky boy stuff that I still have to sort through which is over and under a fun old black-topped school science lab table.

Anyway, it's not perfect (yet!) but it makes me happy.  I keep catching myself standing in the garage just admiring it or finding excuses to go through there now that I can walk unimpeded!

Speaking of impeded... There's still the REST of the garage to be dealt with:

UGH!