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Caution: Steep Upgrade Ahead

 

I got a garage door opener. It can't close... just open."
--- Stephen Wright, American comedian

For a place I don't actually live in, my garage seems to require an awful lot of attention.

My wife Susan can tell you that anyplace where I actually hang out requires a lot of maintenance. The upholstery on my La-Z-Boy looks like I've towed it behind a 4X4 during an off-road excursion. It's constantly surrounded by debris (cups, wrappers, remotes, adrenaline hypos...). There might be a fortune in loose change buried in the cushions, but no one's got the nerve to fish around down there... new life may have developed and it's unlikely to be friendly. The area around my side of the bed is a minefield of books, earbuds, and portable electronic devices; no one's going to be able to murder me in my sleep without incurring some nasty paper cuts and inadvertently emailing a couple of people.

But I don't spend a lot of time in my garage. I don't use it for a rec room (that would be my La-Z-Boy) or a workshop (that would be a Chuck Thornton from an alternate universe). I keep my cars in there, but I don't work on my cars... I have to consult the owner's manual to pop the hood, and after seeing what lies beneath it, I usually end up in a fetal position back in the La-Z-Boy. Bottom line: I think of my garage as essentially an extra couple of doors I pass through on the road between my home and the outside world.

Give me some credit, though: my two-car garage actually contains two cars. While driving through my neighborhood, I've seen garages that have been turned into warehouses for surplus goods that will no longer fit in the house, with the cars dispossessed to the driveway or curb. Don't give me too much credit, though. It's not that I don't collect junk in my garage; it's just that I've been creative in shoving and stacking it up against the walls so the cars can still fit inside and the driver can still enter and exit the car through a window, as long as he greases up first.

But lately, my garage has been crying for attention as the non-auto paraphernalia has continued to grow. My garage, by design, houses our water heater and washer and dryer. In addition to the two cars, it also contains:

As you've probably gathered, something's got to give. Many have suggested that I rent some space at one of the many storage complexes that seem to have sprung up like mushrooms along the side of the freeway and beneath urban underpasses. But my dad would roll over in his grave at the idea of paying somebody to store our junk... he would have sooner erected a small city of aluminum storage sheds in our back yard before renting an off-site storage unit. And I share that same heart-felt solid-as-a-rock conviction.

Not that it stopped me from renting a storage unit. The battle between pragmatism and genetically-encoded conviction had actually been waged months ago, when my son Sam graduated college and moved back into our Santa Clarita home, bringing with him an apartment's worth of furnishings. Pragmatism won that day; I rented a storage unit to hold all the furniture and stuff Sam brought back with him.  So on the front once occupied by the Thornton conviction against non-resident rental, there's nothing but scorched earth.  Sorry, Dad.

Still, my strategy is to avoid putting any of my stuff in the storage unit.  I don't want go down that road, only to have Sam find his own place, start emptying the unit, and invoke a "finders keepers" clause that I missed in the fine print. Besides, as long as the storage unit is Sam-dedicated, I can point in the direction of Sam's room when my dad's disgruntled spirit visits at night.

At any rate, I decided it was time for some serious garage reorganization. My approach was simple. Instead of viewing my garage as a floor on which to stack things, I looked at it as a box, with walls and a ceiling that could be used to hang all sorts of stuff. Sue liked the "box" idea, and immediately started thinking outside of it... way outside of it... like out at the local landfill. So between the dual approaches of perching and pitching, we came up with a plan.

When I visited my brother in Virginia last year, he had shown me how  his garage was organized using a system of wall-mounted slotted panels in which all sorts of hooks and shelves and baskets and other doohickeys could be easily installed. The entire back wall of his garage was covered by these panels, and I was very impressed by how sharp and organized it all looked. Of course, compared to my garage, my brother's is the Taj Mahal of suburban storage. It's roomy and immaculate and completely spider-free, I think because the rent is too high. Also, the valet parking adds a touch of class.

After seeing my brother's garage, I was sold on the wall-system idea. It's manufactured by Whirlpool and marketed under the name Gladiator Garage Works.  I'm sure the Whirlpool marketing people put a lot of consumer research into coming up with the name, but I'm not sure I get it. Were gladiators well-known for their storage organization skills? I've seen some gladiator movies, and there didn't seem to be much focus on where they stowed all their gear... I suppose they could have had pegboard marked with the outlines of spears, shields, swords, and the occasional enemy's head, but I don't think a tidy workshop was a gladiator trademark. I watched 300 recently, and the Spartans didn't seem particularly tidy; in fact, they seemed to leave a mess behind at their worksite. There were also a lot of dramatic battle cries throughout the movie, so I may have missed it, but I didn't see the Spartans charging into the fray screaming "A place for everything, and everything in its place!" But I'm sure the Whirlpool folks know what they're doing, and I probably would have been less likely to buy something called Fussbudget Garage Works.

So I visited my local Lowe's, bought a few of the slotted panels, and started installing my new garage storage system. My garage immediately retaliated by disintegrating my water heater, giving my wife her once-a-decade reminder that water can reach temperatures below 120 degrees, and flooding our garage floor.

I decided that organizing the garage in waders wasn't practical, so I went in to call a repairman, but Sue had already dialed 911 after trying to take a shower, so a guy was out shortly look survey the situation, and in a totally unexpected development, he told us we needed a new water heater.  In an act of defiance against the cylindrical monster that had betrayed us, we ordered a tankless water heater.

Tankless water heaters are smaller, wall-mounted units that don't store and heat water in a tank; rather, they heat the water as it's used. Thus they're incredibly more energy-efficient, while providing a much higher price-tag. For the same amount of money, I could probably have bought seven of the old "tank" style units and kept them lined up in reserve for the next inevitable meltdown, but that would have presented new challenges to the garage-storage project. Besides, with the energy savings, the tankless model will pay for itself by the time the anti-matter models hit the market.

The installer mounted the new unit high up on the wall, near the vaulted ceiling of the garage. It's well out of my reach, which adds a few more years to the warranty. Replacing the old tank model with this new stealth unit freed up some more wall space, so I ran back down to Lowe's and purchased some more Gladiator panels, figuring I could add Gladiator shelves where the old water heater used to sit.

My garage, seeing my plan, countered by emitting a needle-focused electromagnetic pulse that fried my garage door opener motor. We called a guy out to take a look... I think it was a different guy than for the water heater, but I can't be sure... and, in a surprise move, he told us we needed a whole new unit.

He also noted that we were currently using plastic bump pads on the garage floor to let us know when our cars have made it far enough into the garage to allow the door to close. These little portable speed bumps don't adhere to the floor, so we have to constantly readjust them to the proper position. I'm not crazy about them, but I didn't have the technological know-how to install the far superior tennis-ball-hanging-down-from-the-ceiling system.

The garage door opener guy said he could fix us up with the latest laser technology.  It consists of a laser light mounted and positioned on an overhead beam that shines a visible dot on your car. As you pull into the garage, the dot creeps up your hood and onto your dashboard. You stop the car when the dot hits that sweet spot on your dash that you know means the car is far enough inside.

So in addition to the new opener, we went for the lasers. Sue likes it because she doesn't have to worry about the positioning of the old floor mats, and my sons and I like it because as we pull the car into the garage and see that dot moving up the hood, I get to say, "Do you expect me to talk?" and either Ben or Sam get to say, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"

Once the garage door issue had been addressed, I returned to the issue at hand, which, after some research, I remembered was the reorganization of the garage. The next step was disposing of all the unwanted items that wouldn't fit in my garbage cans and were too heavy to throw over the fence into my neighbor's yard. I figured a rented pick-up truck would hold everything for a trip out to the dump... except for the aforementioned 14-foot-long pieces of lumber I had leaning against the wall in the tallest part of my garage. There were ten of these puppies. I thought about laying them in the bed of a pick-up and putting a red flag on the end hanging out over the tailgate, but I figured there was probably a law that says all parts of your cargo have to occupy the same time zone, so I decided not to risk it. The only alternative (other than renting a chipper) was to cut the lumber into small pieces that would fit into my garbage can.

No problem. One of the many items hanging around my garage was a powerful electric chain saw (the mighty Wagner 4 HP "Lumberjack"), used the world over by axe men who have easy access to an AC outlet. As I readied the chain saw, Sue cautioned me that the planks were made out of "pressure treated" wood. But I ignored her, because a) I had the utmost confidence that my testosterone-charged chain saw would cut through the planks like a hot knife through butter; and b) I didn't want to admit to her that I had no idea what "pressure treated" means.

Well, I still don't know what "pressure treated" means, but I can tell you that it's the same process used to manufacture Captain America's shield. The chain saw tried... there was much huffing and puffing and gnashing of teeth... but after ten minutes with nary a notch in the wood, it was clear that these planks were indestructible. I was sure that if I put them in a chipper, the poor machine would live out its remaining days on oatmeal and Jell-O.

Thinking outside the box didn't seem to be getting me anywhere, so I opted for a bigger box. I rented a 14-foot U-Haul moving van so I could transport the planks along with the rest of the stuff out to the dump. (Is it okay to still call it "the dump?" "Sanitary landfill" or "waste management disposal site" sound so inhospitable.) This meant that I was renting a lot of unused space (sort of like my athletic club membership), but I was out of options.

My sons and I loaded up the truck and drove about 25 minutes before we reached the entrance to the dump out in the hills of Castaic. From there, it was an additional 3 day ride to the actual place where things were being dumped... or at least it seemed that way. Landfills may be modern marvels of environmentally-conscious waste management, but they're also extremely lumpy. Driving through the dump in a U-Haul truck with a suspension system made by Fisher-Price is like taking a ride in a paint-mixer. By the time we dumped everything and made it back to the main road, we looked like we'd been going at each other with pressure treated clubs.

At any rate, after we returned the truck I stepped back into the garage to survey the playing field now that some of the bulkier items had been dealt with. It was now clear that the garage could benefit from taking some of the lesser-used-and-accessed items (Christmas decorations, camping gear, exercise equipment) and stowing them on high shelves. So I ran back down to Lowes and picked up some more Gladiator panels and shelving.

And that's where I am right now. I'm about a quarter of a million dollars into the project, and it looks like this:

garage

 I'm sure either me or my descendants will finish it up. It will never look as good as my brother's garage, though. He apparently had a pristine wall to work with, and mounted the Gladiator panels in a way that made it look like wall-to-wall carpeting. The wall in my garage isn't nearly as cooperative... there's all sorts of fixtures and outcroppings and other doohickeys that have to be worked around. So my Gladiator system will probably look more like I was trying to cover up some random rough patches in the drywall.

We'll see. It's a battle of wits between my and my garage, and a lot depends on the garage's next move.