The Garage and The Storage Locker

Happy New Year! I'm so excited! 2008 is the Year of The House. I doubt there will be one boring day out of the entire 366. Even the last few days have been lots of fun. One night was dinner at Jan and Kirk's house with Nick. We talked of Nick's involvement with SLO Green Build, Jan and Kirk's wonderful RV trip to southeast Canada, Randy's trip to India, and, of course, The House since we are all interested in environmental and energy issues. Followed the next day by lunch at the Madonna Inn's Copper Coffeehouse with Wayne and Scott, friend Jim, and their wonderful beagle Eddie. Capped today by lunch with my cousin Marty and her daughter Julie who was visiting from Denver. I love these people. It was so great to see them all.

I promised a few words about the garage and the storage locker. One of the many reasons for building this new house is so that I will finally have room to pursue all my creative interests, especially weaving. I have 4 looms, but there isn't room here for 2 of them: my father's rug loom, and my 16-shaft Macomber. At the moment, like good Californians, our garage is packed with stuff that won't fit in the house. Obviously, boxes of weaving yarn and looms in pieces jammed into the garage aren't of much use to me here and now, so I'm bit by bit going through all this stuff, tossing and organizing where necessary, and carting things to a storage locker just a couple miles from the new house site. Bit by bit, nearly everything in this house will end up in storage there as we prepare to move.

There's nothing easy about this phase of the task: the garage. It's often overwhelming and frequently emotional as I shed stuff that just isn't relevant to my life anymore, however much it once was. I recently read a bit of clarifying advice about cleaning out: if it isn't immediately useful or deemed beautiful, get rid of it. I'll admit that my definition of "immediately useful" is a little loose. For example, I probably need never buy more weaving yarn, other than some basic black, of course. And beauty is clearly in the eyes of the beholder. Still, I love getting cleaned out, cleaned up and organized. When the house is ready for us, all we'll have to do is move stuff from the storage locker into the new house. Everything will be boxed and labelled. So far I've moved my basic weaving yarn into the locker along with boxes of fabric for weaving rugs. To-be-dyed yarn is now organized and boxed, ready to go into storage. Each day I resolve to tackle another box or pile or stuff, making that fateful decision: useful or beautiful? or not?