The other day, someone left a comment on a post (I can’t remember which one) saying something like, “You’re the messiest DIYer I know…” Ummm… YES! It wasn’t a bad comment. She was actually quite complimentary. But that first part of your comment made me laugh because I know it’s true.
I used to feel embarrassed about it, but as the years went by, I just accepted it. I’m getting to that age where I care a lot less about what people think of me than I used to. You know how it is. When we are younger, we are almost consumed by other people’s perceptions of us. As we get older, that becomes less important. It’s not that I don’t want people to think well of me, but I’m much less likely to try to hide the embarrassing parts of myself and my personality these days. I am a messy person and when I work on projects, I am like a tornado leaving a path of destruction behind me. But in the end it always turns out well.
After all, not long ago, my studio looked like this…
But today I’m sitting at my desk in a studio that looks like this…
In the end it always turns out well. And that brings me to the current state of our garage. I have been using this as my workshop for years. It’s where I use my big power tools (miter saw, table saw, planer, etc.). It’s where I paint the cabinet doors and drawer fronts. It’s where I build some things. I leave my big power tools out there and I’m surprised they’ve never been stolen. In fact, nothing of our property has ever been stolen.
But I’m not the best at cleaning up my projects. So I have big piles of sawdust, a huge pile of scrap wood, random pieces of plywood leaning against random items. This has been my very complicated method for years. Now that I have a workshop, I need to build a leftover cart so I can keep it clean, dry, and organized.
My garage is also where they store items that people give me because they think I can do something interesting with them, like that big mirror in the photo below. It really is a unique mirror, but I had nowhere to put it, so I put it in the garage.
I have paint scraps from the workshop and chairs that used to be in the breakfast room, and then were stored in the sun room, and then moved here… for some reason I can’t explain.
I have a small chest freezer that I bought in a panic when our upright freezer in the pantry stopped working. I really don’t want to get rid of it in case I need it again, but I’ve never had a place to store it, so it went to the garage too.
And of course, I always have a trash pile somewhere in the backyard, a place where I can dump all the construction scraps while I’m working on a room. Once the pile grows large enough during or after a project, I hire someone to remove it or rent a dumpster. I’ve never been worried about the pile looking horrible because, frankly, my backyard never looked good anyway. But now that things are happening in the backyard, and I’m on my way to having a nice workshop, and the driveway is finished, and the garage is actually finished (and looks nice when it’s clean), I’d like to stop having such a visible pile of rubbish. As long as there are projects in our house, I will have a pile of junk, but maybe I can find a less visible place for it.
Plus, right now, cardboard boxes are taking over. I’m saving them because my mom and I are going to turn them into stones and boulders for landscaping. For now they can be stored in the workshop and I can take them out of the garage.
But really, they’re just a bunch of tools and clutter left over from projects.
It looks like it’s about to become a junkyard, so this is the next project on the list.
Now that our driveway is finished, I’m so excited to be able to park in the carport. So today, my mom and I are going to tackle this cleaning project and I hope we can finish it all today.
If we can do it today, I’ll share our finished driveway with you tomorrow! I’m incredibly excited about how it turned out. It really changed the look of our house in a way I really didn’t expect.
UPDATE: If you’re wondering about our plans for cardboard boxes, you can check out this post for more information: Fake DIY Rocks and Boulders? Yes please!
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 upper that my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has MS and can’t do physical labor, so I do most of the work in the house alone. You can learn more about me here.
