Andrew needed to be to school this morning a little early so he could work on a project with his class group. No problem. I needed to run to Wal-mart to get the last of the stuff I needed on the grocery list and I wanted to look at some of the utility shelving units for the garage. We’ve got a bike management problem thanks to Santa’s gifts to Andrew and Kyle. Moving 2 large bikes back and forth behind the 2 cars was getting really old really really fast.
That being said, I didn’t want to spend a whole lot and I vaguely remembered seeing a couple in the new “home and hardware” section of the remodeled Wal-mart that were reasonably priced. So I grabbed the $50 gift card that had been on the bookcase in our bedroom for several months. I had discovered this gift card a while back and no one had spent yet. I figure this was a good cause.
So out the door Lance, Andrew, and I went. Kyle had already gotten on the school bus. We dropped Andrew off and Lance was begging for breakfast because he was dieing. I promised if he would be good in the store I’d buy him some breakfast at the store.
It was a hard decision, but not really when you think about the sheer size of the shelving units verses their size. I picked a 72″ tall by 36″ wide chrome unit with 5 shelves. It was just under $48. It was more of a toss up between the 72″ tall one or the one down from that one in height. There was another unit that was much cheaper that was narrower and would have worked better for what I had originally planned, but the one I got was within the measurements I had taken so I erred on the size of larger.
Other things that I grabbed on the way to the register included: 1 ream of printer paper (love the recycled stuff), an 8×10 clear acrylic table frame (for Ben), the shredded cheeses and pepperoni I need for the pizza this week, blueberry crumble bread (because it looked good), some ciabata sandwich rolls (because they looked good), and a dozen chocolate iced doughnuts (for Lance’s breakfast).
It was still rather cold when we got home from Wal-mart this morning. Cold enough that I was NOT going to spend 30 minutes assembling the shelving unit. The box said approximate assembly time was 30 minutes. Not happening as cold as it was. So Lance and I went in and ate some breakfast (blueberry crumble bread for me, doughnuts for him) and let it warm up a little bit before heading back out to tackle the garage.
I was thoroughly surprised at the size of the shelving unit once I got it together. It was just more roomy than I thought it would be, that I could visualize anyway. My goal was just the corner by the door into the house. The garbage cans, recycling bin, the bike racks, the ladder, the shop vac, and lots of other things just making a mounded haphazard pile in the corner. So we cleared everything out of the corner, put the shelves together, and then loaded everything onto the shelves.
Problem: Not enough stuff for the shelves. *gasp*
Solution: Pull things from other areas of the garage that need new homes that are more organized than just randomly placed around where it fits.
So we kept going and going and going. The garage is mostly clean. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t done, but it is much much better than it was. We can at least get both cars in and out of the garage without having to move 2 bikes out of the way every single freaking time we had to go somewhere. We will still need to find a more efficient way to store the bikes, but at least we can get the cars in the garage without all the work. Of course there is this problem we have with a Christmas tree that still needs to get put away too. Ooooops!
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