Baby you can park my car

The garage is done!  Well, as done as it will get.  It is, after all, just a garage.  Jury is out on whether we will paint the floor next year.  Or fix that classless glassless window.  The garage is old, sinking in one corner, and a good amount of moisture comes in from the floor cracks and the lower portion of the walls, so we may just leave it.  Here's the craptastic before again:

And the pared-down and painted after:

Our garbage cans have a new home in a little alcove next to the back porch that was not being used for anything.  So, that means.....we now have room.....for CARS!

I did throw out quite a bit of stuff, but I will admit that I also put some household tools, folding tables, and miscellaneous stuff into the basement because it really didn't need to be outside getting rusty.  I found a great deal on totes to hold alot of what remained, the big ones were 4 bucks at Home Depot, and the small ones along the bottom were 3.50 at Menards! 

The black areas are a little project I wanted to try.  I taped off rectangles, used posterboard with the middle cut out to cover the rest of the totes, then sprayed them with chalkboard paint.  I haven't gotten to the little ones yet because I did this backwards, and those babies are FULL so I don't want to empty them out to lay them on their side. 

               

After it's totally dry I will be able to write what's in the totes without removing them because they are pretty heavy with stuff.  It was a pain, so we'll see if I actually use it. 

Thank goodness it's all over, it's feeling like Forks cold and rainy around here!

Ever have one of THOSE weekends?

When did it become Monday?  Why did I do so much, yet get nothing 'done' this weekend? Why won't all THIS:

Fit into THESE:

And WHY, if this garage is big enough to have taken ten years days to paint, is it too small to fit all our stuff along with two average-sized cars??!  And WHY did our brand new garage door opener decide to stop working a week after installation??

Happy Monday, everyone. 

Less junky

Ok, the junk is still there, but the walls holding the junk look better.  We used a beige 'masonry' primer to cover the sickly green, here is Shaun going over the primer with the first coat of paint:

You may notice we used a brush first in all the crevices.  I bought the expensive 'extra fluffy' roller covers made for masonry, but it still wasn't getting in there.  Oh well....brush it was.  We did two coats of paint, but we probably didn't need to.  The paint is Behr Stucco and Masonry paint, which I have mixed feelings about.  It was very runny for a 'self priming' paint, however it covered surprisingly well.  I guess the bottom line will be the staying power and scrub-ability.  You know, because I expect to be scrubbing the walls of my garage on a regular basis - NOT! 

I chose Behr Antique White for the walls because that is the color of all our interior hallways, and I didn't want to use gray and make it look more cinderblock-y.  I extended the white ceiling down to the first row of blocks to sort of mimic crown molding.  You likey?  The ceiling is a big pain, I have to cut in around all the garage door apparatus and other weird things that are stuck into that ceiling with no hope of removal.  But I'm getting it done slowly.  The next thing is a shopping trip to Lowe's with a $10 coupon to get more shelves and new garbage cans! 

Yes, I'm excited about new garbage cans!  You would be too, if yours looked like they lost a battle with a chain saw.

And uh, just ignore the empty keg back there. 

Cars don't live here

Ah, the infamous garage.  The downfall of messy homeowners everywhere.  Similar to the guest room, the garage ends up being chalk full of junk instead of what the space was intended to be used for.  We have 5 bedrooms and a full basement, but somehow our garage still turned into a storage unit.  Oh, and it is quite a scary-looking cinderblock prison, too:

This is after Shaun had cleaned it out.  We could only park one car in here, on the side with the half-assed attempt at painting it blue, next to the broken window that had been filled with bricks (problem solved!!) and the previous owner's helpful message to 'STOP HERE!' painted on the wall.  In our defense, until last week we couldn't really park on the other side because that garage door's opener was broken before we moved in.  That has been fixed, thankfully.  So, what are we to do about the mess?  Well, we started by putting everything into the middle of the garage and ripping out that stupid shelf in the back that prevented us from moving our tall storage shelves back there. 

             

Then we left it like this and went to have some drinkys:

             

Ha ha ho ho hee hee, I'm just kidding!  I will show you the goods tomorrow when I'm kinda done.  Ah, painting a cinderblock tomb while it's 45 degrees outside....good times.  Thank goodness for wine space heaters - and not just for me, but so my paint doesn't glob onto the walls like Amy Winehouse's liquid liner.  They don't put those 'minimum temperature 50 degrees' warnings on your paint cans for nothing!