Sam's Garage

it's interesting how things turn out..

when my mother passed, i refused to scramble right away to figure out what to do with all her stuff.. her stuff and ours. so much memorabilia she had hung on to over the years made up most of her belongings. and some random old solid wood furniture. so i snagged a storage locker for a month to give me time to sort out what is what.

for the past couple weeks, ive been trying to organize what's in my little room in this tiny little bachelor apartment so that maybe we could squeeze in some of mom's furniture, and i took it as an opportunity to go through all of my stuff. in doing so, i found that most of my stuff [minus the memorabilia] is actually useful stuff, and a lot of it [clothes, gear, outdoor stuff] is only used seasonally, and i thought how handy it would be to have a garage. tada! lightbulb..

the storage locker is right down the road! we're paying so little for rent here, it's worth the extra hundred bucks a month to rent the space to store all our gear for it's season of use. and now that we have the space to work through the things we own, we can actually make use of them instead of becoming frustrated trying to remember where things are in the multiple stacks of totes in the corner of the room.

not sure why i'd never thought of it before, but i suppose i'm glad i didn't because i wouldn't have the very one i have now. especially given my previous experiences living out of small storage spaces, you would think i would have thought sooner to hang on to it. after a few weeks of trying to figure out how to get rid of the furniture, and then realizing i didn't really want to, i'm glad now i have a way to make use of it until we have a workshop of our own. the storage locker rearranged is now Sam's Garage.

given we used the name she went by the most as the name for Sandy Shores Farm, i figured it'd only be fitting to call the other creative space after another of her nicknames, Sam. it is after all half her stuff and half mine, which is all a part of the same story anyway.

i like this space. i ended up with a bigger locker than we needed because it was the only one left, apparently storage lockers are in high demand this time of year. with the extra space, everything can be arranged functionally and organized so that it can be used instead of stacked in a heap like it was in our little spare room. it faces east so it doesn't heat up as horribly as the units that get the afternoon sun, and there's a bunch of cats that hang out in the garden i can see from the garage. i had my headphones on while sitting at the table going through papers, and three of them had snuck right to the door to check me out.

now that taking inventory of my life and organization have made it to the frontline of my action plan, i'm excited to have this opportunity to take advantage of. i have my very own garage! and i can keep all my textbooks there like my own little library instead of constantly praying i don't lose any of them to the dampness that sometimes overtakes the apartment. and if ever i'm in a situation where i must vacate where i'm at [especially since technically it's not even my apartment], i can certainly stack everything in a way so that it all fits here, bed included. my whole life [and hers] fits into a ten by ten foot square.

onward...