My Garage Seat
I am becoming a man of new interests. When I started working in late June, 1976 it was a mere two months before I got engaged to be married. Our wedding was just after Thanksgiving. By February we had bought a house. It was a nice little starter house with three bedrooms and a bath upstairs and a kitchen, living room, dining room, den and half bath downstairs. As a starter house, there was either nothing to do to it or everything to do to it. It was fine and perfectly livable when we bought it for $64,000, but we chose instead to dream bigger and slowly redo almost every room one way or another. Given that our combined income, even after our respective first raises was $29,000. That meant that our finances involved a mortgage of $55,000 (15% down-payment), a monthly payment of some $615 (I took a 15-year mortgage and there was monthly escrow of taxes and homeowner’s insurance). That represented 36% of our post-tax income, leaving us $1,076 per month of disposable income for food, commutation, clothing and household renovations. There were no savings left after the down-payment. And there were credit card bills to pay for the closing costs, which I had not anticipated to be so much. That meant that anything we wanted to do to the house we did ourselves. Every night I would come home and take out the heat gun and strip a few more feet of old-lady-green panted mounding and/or baseboard. I learned to do all sorts of home repairs in those days including painting, wallpapering, kitchen renovating, laying down new linoleum flooring and simple wiring. Anything big we got a family-friend contractor to do with me taking a few days off to do the heavy lifting and grunt work.
As the first one of my siblings to get a house (even though I was the youngest), when both of my sisters came to visit and see the homestead, as humble as it may have been, they both wondered aloud the same thing; where had I learned to wield tools and do handy work around the house? We had grown up our whole lives without a fatherly presence and with a mother who was too busy either in graduate school or working to bother with trivialities like DIY projects around the house. It is safe to say that since most of the homes we lived in growing up were rentals, and short-term ones at that, there had been precious few projects to learn about wielding tools as simple as hammers and screwdrivers, much less anything resembling a power tool. Both of my sisters were more than a little surprised and perplexed by this working class affectation I had assumed.
Over the years I did many household projects in the various primary and secondary homes that I owned. They ran the gamut from basic to involved and my participation also ranged from detached to involved. The trend over the years was unmistakable, the more responsibility I took on at work, the busier I got. That meant that I not only didn’t take vacation time for household projects, but I rarely took more than half of my vacation time at all. In those days, finding a work/life balance was far less a managerial goal than it is these days. There was also the matter of money. There was more of it for projects, but enough more to afford the luxury to have other professionals do the work. When you move up in class in your housing, there is also less that you can reasonable DIY and still maintain the quality integrity of the home. So the odds were stacked against my continued advancement and involvement in household projects. That was all she wrote for many years.
At my various vacation homes, including this one (which enjoyed that status for almost eight years) I always had others doing both regular maintenance and project work. In the case of this house that has been some combination of brother-in-law Jeff, his wife Lisa and various specialized tradesmen. I was rarely, if ever, directly involved. That meant that the domain of the garage, which serves as the center for all things homeowner since there is no attic or basement in this one-level California home. We do have some storage down in the utility rooms under the house along the hillside, but those house the mechanical systems and stored junk ranging from paint to extra carpeting. The thing about storage and utility space in a house that is not yours is that there is little incentive to become OCD about it. I try never to do down in the basement in Ithaca. I leave that and the shed to cousin Pete and they are scary places (literally a buttressed stone wall foundation with damp floors and dark corners and an unlit shed with outdoor equipment). But out here in California, the garage is a center of attention for us every day. The cars, the motorcycles, the motorcycle gear, all the storage bins and even the strollers for Lord Cecil in his infirmed and aging state.
One of the first things we tackled after we had sorted out the 350 moving boxes that we had staged in the garage, was to get the garage set up with wall-to-wall stainless steel shelving. This is a three-car garage with plenty of extra space. I have friends with garages that house 7-15 vehicles and this is not that, but it is a reasonably big garage. Since I am not a car aficionado per se, I don’t collect fancy cars the way some of my friends do. My motorcycle gear takes up perhaps 15 % of the wall space and my two bikes use up one of the three bays.. Kim has chosen to have a dedicated “wrapping station and craft table” at the far end of the garage, but that has yet to become operational. My side has been furnished with an old repurposed kitchen cabinet counter and laminated drawers and cupboards. There is also room for a red sofa that I moved out of the study. You may wonder if a garage sofa would get any use, but the funny thing is that I sit on it almost every day now. Its the perfect place to unpack delivered products (of which there is a regular flow). It is also a substitute office for discussing things with Handy Brad as we plot out his next project. Right now he is busy organizing the storage rooms under the house to organize them better with all that extra grout, tile and paint as needed for the various parts of the house. I’ve also commissioned him to improve the walkways down under since they were a bit “rough” and in need of sprucing up.
With the garage door open and the WiFi in the garage good and strong (for the Liftmaster openers, the Sense, the Tesla and God knows what else), that little red sofa has become a favorite spot for me. It’s shady and gives me a place and purpose for organizing the household projects. I have bought a label maker (a must for the newly retired man of leisure) and have now organized the cabinets and drawers with everything labeled. Handy Brad is a man after my own heart on such things and he was duly impressed. When I saw the great job he was doing with new steel case shelves in the utility room, I was equally impressed. My new power seat of the moment is my garage seat and I must say, it makes me feel productive and feeling productive is to me to feel good.