Not Every Day Can Be A Pretty Day

There are a lot of ways I could have spent this sunny summer Saturday.

I could have gathered the fresh bloom of roses into vases and tucked them here and there around the house.

I might have painted some new pieces of art for the gallery walls I'm planning. 

Shoot, I could have gone totally crazy and lounged in the sun with a good book, cooling myself off every now and then in my pocket-sized pool.

But no. 

Today I was feeling fierce.

So I walked out to the grubbiest corner of my ever-challenging garage, and dug in.

My husband does not like to declutter. He likes to keep things, because he never knows when he might need them. And he specifically does not like other people to declutter for him, because honestly, he knows my daughters and I are likely to get rid of what isn't nailed down. So convincing him to straighten out his workbench is going to be the grand finale of our entire garage reclamation project. This corner next to his workbench, however, is fair game for me, and I mounted a full attack. 

This is the spot where we 

hang our hard-working garden tools,

park the fertilizer spreader and the odd assortment of fertilizer, seed, and soil bags,

house my husband's collection of used oversize bags which he uses for, ahem, Gracie's yard waste,

and hide a handful of other such lovelies.

I mean, at first, I thought it would be a quick project.

Drag everything out to the driveway, 

wipe down the white painted walls, 

scrub out the concrete floor, 

and declutter as I put it all back.

Yeah, right. Sometimes I'm so delightfully naive, I even make myself laugh.

I realize there is something profoundly unsustainable about painting garage walls white. Especially the walls where the garden tools hang. But I adore the look of the crisp white wood against the raw lumber of the roof, and therefore I paint anyway. 

Because once I transferred the abhorrent heap to the driveway and gave the walls a no-nonsense scrub down with some Simple Green , I realized that the paint was beyond salvation. Suddenly, a quick painting project seemed the most logical thing in the world. 

So. Out came the drop cloths and the paintbrushes and the mini paint roller and the step ladder.

My husband, who had been installing trellises on the back fence, walked into this malestrom without warning. "Hey, would you mind pulling out these nails for me?" I hollered as he stopped in his tracks and gaped at my progress. 

"Uhh, I didn't know you were planning to paint," he tried to recover. 

"Yeah, well, neither did I," I said gaily. "But now I'm committed."

Googling " how to remove rust stains from cement floor" as we speak. 

The first coat flew on in about an hour, and after a break to walk my ever-patient dog, I tackled the first round of sorting out the keepers from the let-go-ers, and organized the two piles back into the garage for the night.

Tomorrow, I'll give that corner a second coat of paint, convince my husband that it's okay to get rid of all the things in my go pile, and then carefully put everything back into place. 

And then, I'll have to think of some other interesting thing to do with my summer afternoon.