My wife and I recently cleaned and reorganized our garage. I do this every six months as a means of restoring order in a chaotic world. If I can’t fix the economy, broker peace in the Middle East, or stop cars from speeding down my street, at least the garage can momentarily become an oasis of order.
Like most families, our garage is a hodge-podge intersection of the different facets of our lives. It’s the spillover area for extra food we keep that won’t fit in the pantry or our refrigerator. Ditto with other household items: it holds two trunks, an area rug, and a dog kennel we’ve neither used in six years nor had the heart or initiative to divest ourselves of. We have two ‘memory chests’ involving mementos from earlier milestones in our children’s lives: stratified layers of drawings, photographs, certificates, treasured and now undersized clothing items. The chests used to reside in the main house until our older daughter discovered their existence and insisted that every scrap of art she made was ‘memory worthy’ and needed to saved. Above the memory chests several bins comprise a failed attempt at a comprehensive, portable three-day emergency kit, a holdover from the post-911 days and further evidence that I would make a lousy Mormon, or Prepper.
My workbench, tools, fishing gear, and weights for Charles Atlas moments occupy the southeast corner. Less a Man cave, it’s more like a Man Alcove; there’s not enough room for the high def TV and bar that I vaguely wish for on occasion.
We stash our recreational gear—camping items, bikes, baseball equipment, golf clubs, tents and sleeping bags—on shelves I bought and assembled along east wall and above where we park the car. Last year I bought a canoe and a pulley and hoist system, and the canoe now resides about six feet off the ground in a perpetual state of hover over the hood of our car. It took several months for my wife and I to overcome the feeling of terror that at any moment the canoe would come crashing down onto the Subaru—or either us or one of the children.
But now an entire corner of the garage is now lovingly devoted to garbage and recycling. As Portland, Oregon, residents, we are conscripted into healthy curbside recycling program—and the unspoken societal pressure to be Good Citizens and active recyclers--which necessitates creating a shrine of sorts dedicated to Managing Waste and Minimizing Trash. Our shrine accommodates a recycling bin for glassware, vessels to corral recyclable plastic bags, block Styrofoam, batteries, light bulbs, and other hazardous materials requiring proper disposal, a modest, 20 gallon garbage can, and finally one 60 gallon bin each for commingled items and yard debris, respectively.
Yes, I said 60 gallons. These latter, color-coded vessels are gaudy, of alarming proportions and come with wheels and a schedule for trundling out the green yard debris can every two weeks. It’s part of the City of Roses’ ambitious plan to recycle up to 75 percent of all waste by 2015, five short years from now (http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=309300) They’re the reason for the latest garage re-organization; we’d found storing them inside the garage without proper accommodations made our collections of garage bric-a-brac even more cluttered and, until we properly re-assembled the Shrine to Recycling and Proper Disposal, required a series of Cirque du Soleil-esque contortions to wiggle into our Subaru Forester.
We tried storing the bins outside, but such a move proved both gauche and dangerous. I could sense the silent disapproval of our neighbors and pedestrians for failing to keep our recycling activities a private affair, at least until Friday when curbside pickup was necessary. Then there was the public safety/waste issue: having jumbo bins outside and had unfortunately, on occasion, tempted dog owners of a certain persuasion—the profoundly ignorant, the profoundly lazy, the profoundly disrespectful, or a combination of all of the above--to dispose their pet waste into our blue recycling.
This civic transgression would trigger my otherwise charming wife’s Mr. Hyde side. She would mutter and curse about the decline of Western Civilization, flag down any transgressing passerby she spotted desecrating our bins and demand that they remove the uninvited baggie of dog turds. Once in a moment of extreme pathos, she fabricated and affixed to the lid of one bin a sign that reminded everyone ‘This is a recycling bin that looks like every recycling bin in Portland, perhaps like the one you have…” The words ‘It is not for your Dog Shit,’ ‘contamination of the City’s recycling program,’ ‘inconsiderate, and ‘stupid’ followed in large, assertive block letters, with an warning that further transgressions might invite forced consumption of the offending substance.
Although the poo incidents dropped off markedly after that, I also noticed a significant drop-off in foot traffic by our house, and was relieved when the rain blurred the ink and the hint that Unstable People Might Dwell Here. I put up a poetry post a few months ago with positive, life-affirming passages to assure the residents of Southeast that we aren’t totally nuts.
Much to my relief, I recently learned that we are not alone in our struggles to accommodate our ginormous recycling albatrosses. Yesterday I came across my friend Scott solving his problem by building a cinderblock enclave for his recycling bins just outside of his home’s entryway. As a general contractor, he has a bit of a leg up since the idea of working with concrete doesn’t terrify him like it does me. Inside his basement is out of the question as a storage option, incidentally, since it’s been converted to an incredible, Home and Gardens-themed cluster kids play areas, offices, and built-in shelves I have neither the imagination, space, nor aptitude to create. I suspect he has his own man alcove somewhere in there, too, perhaps even a full-blown cave. With better tools, probably.
While we surveyed his creation, Scott told me of his across-the-street neighbor, who made an outside recycling storage area herself out of cedar. I thought of an old fairy tale when I recollected that the shelves I’d installed were made of pressboard, and wondered how those wood screws I presumably drilled in the garage studs would hold.
Three Little Pigs, Portland-style A recycling house made with straw (of sorts), one of sticks, one of stone. Hmmm. who would have thought two plastic bins for co-mingled recyclables and compostables would someday play the part of the big, bad wolf?
So now that the garage is done and the shrine to recycling is completed, it’s time to move on to a new project. In a moment impulsiveness (subliminal garage envy?) I dropped $6.99 on a copy of the Better Homes and Gardens’ ‘Storage: Get Organized Once and For All’ Special Edition. After weeks of trying to tune out portentous news of Ground Zero mosques, mid-term congressional and Oregon gubernatorial elections, and the likelihood that the historic reservoirs in our neighborhood park may be covered over, I’m thinking of building something to corral our runaway papers in the home office.
This time I’m thinking I’ll work with wood. Maybe even concrete.
