The picture above is of our garage as it currently stands. Before you pass judgement along the lines of what a messy old place it is, let me just say that it’s a lot tidier than it was a few months ago. That’s because before Christmas, remember that, we had the roof repaired, removed and then replaced, in fact.
In addition, another very significant factor in the garage’s potential revitalisation is the door (see yellow below) I put in the big up-and-over door that was there before and still is for that matter. It was a considerable pain to open up so, as a consequence neither Mrs Summerhouse nor I bothered to do so. I think I mentioned all this before in previous retirement blogs.
Anyway with greater accessibility, and the novel and pleasant sensation of not being rained on, we’ve been considering to what use we might put this quite significant space. But first it needed emptying – a bit. So since then I’ve been gradually throwing out stuff we definitely did not need or had gone beyond the great divide.
As you will know, if you read these blogs regularly, I have also been using up quite a lot of that old wood that people mocked me for keeping. True there has been quite a lot of simply moving items from one spot to another. This including taking stuff in the van up to the barn / vineyard where it has more space to be over-looked / avoided.
I agree it still looks fairly cluttered but at least you can now see parts of the floor and what’s more it’s dry. So happy days. Of course having created this happiness-related space I have to start wondering (not quite yet worrying, not yet) what should I do with it. Add into the mixing bowl increased chronological space courtesy of the lockdown and you can see it’s in danger of becoming an issue.
So what to do? There have been some fairly wild ideas and, I have to say, I’m a long way from deciding. If you’ve turned into a bit of a Youtube aficionado over this period like me, you’ll know there are plenty of options out there. Yesirree, Bob.
For example only this morning as the dogs and I drank our tea and ate digestive biscuits in bed, what should pop up but a video on how to restore an old pipe wrench. Just wait before you let that sneer get the better of you and you stop reading. The fact that you could pop down to Machine Mart or whatever your store of convenience is, wait I forget we can’t pop to places like this anymore (true at time of writing maybe not now). But the principle holds true. The fact you could buy a new and probably better wrench for about the same money as this guy spent on vinegar, rust remover, WD 40, sanding discs, pieces of metal to re-bore, etc., is not the point. There’s a simple pleasure in bringing something old back to life.
The fact that my grandfather was an engineer who had lots of tools which I kept of course, means there are rich pickings in the restoration world in this garage. See example below. This, in case you didn’t recognise it, is an old, very old vice from my grandfather’s shed at the Derbyshire cottage. It would need a very solid workbench to hold it. Which in itself could be a garage project.
At a less mechanical level but still with bags of potential, there are these old railway lamps (below) that have languished in the garage for as long as we have lived in this house (40 years?). An achievable project (I even made a start on one of them) but not with the same history / provenance.
If you want something even more ancient then see the photo below the lamps and scales. This is an old wringer I’ve had for about 40 years bought with the intention of making it into a printing press. It’s a got a way to go as you can maybe see.
But, if I really wanted to go for broke on the restoration front, there are the fireplaces. Let me explain. When we had the gardening business our son and his workers used to bring all manner of objects home from jobs they had been working on and store them in my garage. How I cursed him. Can you make out the tree trunks in the third photo below that he swore he was going to make into garden benches. I never believed him and true enough here they are untouched and unmoveable and taking up a fair amount of space.
Anyway I digress. He also brought home these two fireplaces above. Tiles and all. They’re probably quite valuable but of course I will never sell them, I just buy stuff. But what I could do is restore them and then not sell them. It’s going to take a few cans of rust remover and WD40 and considerable physical commitment but they certainly would be a project and a half. So put them on my list of possible garage uses for future consideration.
Then there are the three bikes, two generations worth of them. Two of them came all the way back from OZ to sit in this garage. True, somebody took one of the wheels off and locked it and the other bike to the other bike and of course we have no idea of the combination, so it’s going to be difficult to do anything useful with them. Unless cleaning them up so they look nicer in a corner of the garage is useful. Hmm, this isn’t helping.
Of course the real whizz banger of an idea came to me the other day. I have no idea from where. It’s about using the garage as an art studio. Even using it as a craft workshop would be less crazy. And when I say art studio I mean mine not Mrs SH’s. She doesn’t need a studio, she has the attic as the studio. I’m talking about a manly studio, sort of Jackson Pollock type of thing. All splashy, impasto (is that the word?), lay it (oil paint) on with a pallet knife (as I used to as an art student).
So you realise that in a former life I used to be an art student. It’s where Mrs SH and I met. So I do have previous but, the problem is, I haven’t actually painted anything other than the odd door or piece of furniture for many, many years. Which begs the question, what the hell would I paint? Mrs SH has helpfully offered me a couple of her old canvases and she seems strangely keen to see what I might come up with. As of now and over 1,000 words I can honestly say, I haven’t the faintest idea. Watch this retirement blog space for further news about what I decided to do with the garage in my retirement.