For a brief and shining period, we had managed to get one car into our two-car garage.
Anyone who has lived in a house for a while knows that this is more of an accomplishment than it sounds. A garage is rarely just a place for cars. It is where everything goes that you need, might need, used to need, or are afraid to throw away because you know you will need it three weeks later.
Ours had an even bigger job after we moved in. It became the overflow space for the contents of two households. Over time, we sorted, moved, kept, donated, and got rid of enough that we finally reclaimed enough space to park a car inside.
We apparently mistook that for progress.
Then we decided to remodel the master bathroom.
The car is outside again, and the garage is now the staging area. It currently contains a bathtub in a box, a new bathroom vanity still in its box, a pile of tile, several sheets of green drywall stacked on the floor, a miter saw, a riding mower, a wall full of yard tools and equipment, shelves of assorted garage necessities, a file cabinet full of old receipts, a table full of rechargeable batteries for tools and flashlights, a pile of boxes in the corner, and a toilet sitting in the middle of it all.
So our two-car garage currently holds no cars and parts of one bathroom.
The old vanity, at least, is gone. I was perfectly prepared to drag it to the street and let the garbage truck have it, but Laurie listed it on Facebook Marketplace. I thought she was crazy.
Someone paid us $50 for it.
They actually came to our house, gave us money, and hauled away something I was about to throw away. Considering that we have already invested somewhere around $2,000 in the bathroom, the $50 is not exactly turning the project profitable, but it still felt like a victory.
One odd thing about remodeling is that your definition of progress changes. Before you start, progress means a finished room. Once you are in the middle of it, progress means the old vanity is gone, the right fitting finally came loose, the trash pile got smaller, or you made it home from the hardware store without realizing you forgot the one thing you actually went there to buy.
The bathroom materials have simply moved into an already established garage ecosystem. There is the riding mower that every homeowner needs but nobody seems to think about when imagining all that wonderful garage space. There are yard tools and equipment along the wall, the miter saw waiting for the next cut, and enough rechargeable batteries on one table to suggest we are preparing for either a home improvement project or a prolonged power outage.
Then there is the file cabinet full of old receipts and records. They are apparently important enough that we have to keep them, but not important enough that anyone will ever voluntarily open the drawer and look at them again. That may be the purest form of garage storage: necessary, permanent, and almost completely unused.
A garage may be the only room in the house where a bathtub, toilet, riding mower, miter saw, file cabinet, bathroom vanity, hedge trimmer, stacks of boxes, and a pile of rechargeable batteries can all coexist without anyone finding the arrangement particularly strange. Somehow, there is even a system to it. There is the yard-tool area, the power-tool area, the charging area, the things we are saving because they are still good, and now the future-bathroom department.
Most of what lives in a garage is supposedly temporary. The leftover lumber will get used. The boxes are going somewhere else. The receipts only need to be kept for a while. The bathtub and vanity will eventually move into the bathroom. Then there are the things we set aside because somebody might want them someday—which, as it turns out, is occasionally worth $50.
Some of these temporary arrangements last for years.
Maybe that is the real function of a garage. It is a holding area for the life of the house. Its contents change as the house changes. Ours has spent years absorbing the overflow of projects, tools, records, equipment, and everything else that never quite belongs anywhere else. Eventually enough space opened up that, for a short time, we actually parked a car there again.
It was nice while it lasted.
We have remodeled most of the house at this point, and the master bathroom is the second-to-last room on the list. Once this one is finished, only the kitchen remains. You would think being this close to the end would make the disruption easier to tolerate, but right now the master bathroom has stopped being a bathroom in any meaningful sense, leaving us with one functioning toilet and one shower for somewhere between two and four people depending on who is home.
Meanwhile, the missing bathroom appears to have reassembled itself in pieces in the garage.
Eventually, the tile will be installed, the vanity will come out of its box, the bathtub will move inside, and the toilet will once again be connected to plumbing instead of sitting by the riding mower. The garage will slowly reappear, and perhaps someday we will once again get one car into our two-car garage.
At least until we start on the kitchen.