The Full Suburban: Our Garage of Wonders gets the hanging treatment
My husband Logan and oldest son George worked all afternoon cleaning out and organizing our garage one day this summer. This is not a pleasant job, as anyone who has ever wrangled unruly frisbees, toppled-over bikes, greasy lawn equipment and scattered kitty litter will attest.
Everyone but George disappeared when Logan started pulling things out of the garage and onto the driveway. This was not our first rodeo, and we knew what a demanding 4 hours lay ahead of anyone who didn’t make themselves scarce.
Even I avoided the garage for the rest of the afternoon, playing the “I gave birth to six children and therefore don’t have to do this hard thing” card, which gets me out of all sorts of undesirable tasks and also has served as a wonderful excuse for consistent weight gain for the past decade.
By the end of the day, the garage was looking pretty amazing. As oldies music blasted on the radio, and Logan and George finished sweeping out every last bit of dirt from the floor, the other kids started wandering back into the garage. They were impressed.
“The garage is mega!” commented 5-year-old Hyrum, using a word that I’m pretty sure means “really cool” – but can’t be 100% sure, so please don’t say it without checking with someone else first.
“I love being out here now!” added 8-year-old Emmett, eyeing a bike in the corner that had previously been lost to the world. “How did you guys do it?”
As far as I can tell, the secret to this Garage of Wonders lies in nailing things to the wall. Logan and George tacked up nails in every inch of free space and hung pretty much everything they could find. Shovels, brooms, skateboards, bike helmets, soccer goal posts, whatever.
They all got the hanging treatment. There seemed to be three criteria for deciding what should and should not be hung:
1) Is it on the floor?
2) Is it alive?
3) Is it likely to last longer than two days if suspended from a haphazardly placed 3-inch nail?
If any two of the three questions were answered with a “yes,” it got hung on the wall. I’m still feeling bad about the cat, but what can you do? (Just kidding, cat people! Don’t worry – we took him down within minutes.)
Seeing my family’s awe at how the garage turned out made me wonder if they would be as impressed if I did the same kind of thing to the interior of our house.
I’ve long believed that one of the secrets to my happiness is the presence of lots and lots of hooks for hanging coats, wet snow gear, aprons, backpacks, towels, etc. But those things are so ordinary, so expected.
Maybe I could really take this idea to the next level, as in: “Mom, I can’t find any of my underwear. Do you know where they are?”
“Of course I do. I tacked them up on the wall by the front door. Let me know if any of them needs to be thrown in the wash, will you?”
Or this: “Honey, do you have any idea where our homeowner’s insurance policy could be?” “Nailed to the office ceiling,” I’d reply, hardly glancing up from my morning newspaper.
“And just so you know, dinner will be at 6 o’clock tonight served firefighter-style, like we’re responding to a five-alarm inferno. Just grab your mashed potatoes and chicken from the bag nailed to the kitchen wall and go.”
Really, the possibilities are endless for indoor, nail-style wall hanging: books that don’t fit on our bookshelf, toys that are forever being kicked around the floor instead of being put away, extension cords, plastic containers full of leftover taco meat … really, I could go on and on.
But for some reason, I don’t think anyone would be very impressed.
Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.