If there’s one thing that I admittedly kind of miss about living in Northern Michigan, it’s storage space.
Pretty much every house around up there has a basement, which is basically like a whole ‘nother house underground! Not to mention my Mom’s house has a ginormous garage with lots of room to stash things, so there was never really an issue of not having enough room to put stuff when I lived up there.
I think I’ve parked in the garage of the house that we now own maybe twice, and it was mainly because we were going out of town and I really worked at it to squeeze my car in so that it didn’t have to sit outside the entire time that we were gone.
Last house I never got to park in the garage because it was laid out stupid and had shelves and a huge workbench on every wall, so my car physically couldn’t fit inside. Not that the garage door opener ever worked at that place anyways…
The house before that, where Sara & I lived for a good 3.5 years – now that was a nice garage and we both got to park inside … probably because we hadn’t been living together too long, so we hadn’t accumulated that overflow of stuff yet, and most of the junk that we did have could cram inside the closet in the spare bedroom.
In this house, said closet is still packed, and the closet in our bedroom, and there’s still a bunch of crap in our family room that has yet to find a home, and … well, see above picture for further examples!!!
I feel like every new place that we move into has less and less storage space, although it’s probably just that the longer we’re together, the more stuff we’re accumulating, be it tools, or pool toys, or pictures for the walls. Granted, right at this moment we also have a bunch of my sister-in-law’s stuff out in our garage because she currently lives with us, and that takes up a little corner of space, too, but I was out there this evening trying to get to the Christmas lights … and I never actually did because I spent all of my time wading through piles and filling up the garbage can with the latest candidates for that big trash heap in the sky!
I’m thinking about finding a few things to maybe stash up in the attic because apparently we have one of those now, even though admittedly I’m not all too keep about going up there … but maybe just some basic stuff that we’ll likely never need, like a bunch of the closet doors that we’ve removed from several rooms to make the closets easier to access – don’t really need those until if/when we ever sell the place again.
I’m sure there’s honestly a ton more that could ultimately just be thrown out altogether – do I really still need my old VCR, or even the CD player that came with my home theater system that technically isn’t even setup right now because I’d just as soon replace it with something newer and more compact that actually has enough inputs for all of my toys these days???
I’ve also got a whole bag full of diving gear out there that even if I do ever find my way back into that hobby again and manage to lose enough weight to reasonably sink to the bottom of the sea, there ain’t no way in hell that I’m ever fitting into the same wet suit that I wore when I was 17, so why am I even keeping that thing?!
There’s also an old CRT monitor out there that I used to use with my home server that hasn’t lived in years, there’s the kiddie pool for Cleo that we bought her for her birthday last year and now have no reasonable place to put it, lots of paint cans in various shapes and sizes and colors of which many are probably empty and can get pitched, a couple of old fish tanks of varying sizes, some replacement fence boards that I guess I forgot to nail up, a very rugged travel case full of microphones and cables from my PA system that’s still up in Michigan and I’m not really sure how just it found its way down here, two SCUBA tanks that might still be good because being overweight doesn’t impact an aluminum tank, although they’re very old and definitely need to be re-tested … the list goes on…
LOL – so maybe I’m looking at this “problem” wrong and instead of finding more space to store crap, maybe I just need to learn to better manage my crap and get rid of scads of stuff that I haven’t fit into or turned on or hung on my walls in half a decade or more!
Bleh. 😕