Middle Garage Pt. 1

Ah, the space between the laundry room and the ‘new garage.’ We call this the middle garage. This room was the first addition that my grandparents added to the house after they moved in.

When family would visit, this is the way we came in because there is an outside door that leads through to the inside of the house. As a child, I wasn’t particularly fond of being in there. It felt like a scary, dark tunnel you had to muster up the courage to walk through in order to reach Narnia. Stacks of boxes & various items towered above, reaching into the rafters. The following pictures illustrate how the room looked after it sat vacant. Animals unfortunately got in & littered wrappers & other trash on the floor. 

My mom, my cousin David and I began cleaning out this room July 8th of 2017. Looking back, this seems like one of the most difficult rooms we’ve done but each one has its own challenges. This room in particular was rough though because of the shear quantity that was piled inside. Along with it were food items and canned goods from many years ago that animals had gotten into. And while we started cleaning out the trash in the summer, we didn’t plan on completely clearing it out until the other main rooms in the house were finished. 

After arriving to the house in February with my mom however (we were working on painting the hallway at this time) we opened up the door to the middle garage to find that the cinder block wall had officially caved in after being cracked across the middle for over 30 years. Because it was built into a hill, dirt spilled in and covered the floor, leaving behind a massive hole to the outside. 

This put a rush on cleaning out the middle garage entirely so that the wall could be repaired. My dad and his friend Dan came over to put in steel posts so the roof wouldn’t collapse in the meantime. “Always an adventure at the homestead” I say. 

After the wall was complete, I spent most of the summer of 2018 continuing to sort through items & clear out the space in pursuit of Gavin’s dream of turning it into his workshop one day. And that is where we’ll pick up next..