Friday 6 May 2016

Spring cleaning

The garage at Tense Towers is used for what, I suspect, a large number of garages are used for i.e. storage of all manner of what-have-you and not for keeping a car under cover.

Sadly, though we have been here over two years, there are still boxes that haven't been unpacked and they must now be on borrowed time, their contents having not been needed in 30 months.

Today, with the sun shining and a warm breeze gently drying the laundry, I decided to have a bit of a spring clean. There is plenty of shelving in the garage but it is perhaps not used to its full potential, so a little thought allowed me to reorganise and make the place more ergonomic. Two piles of detritus accumulated by the car: a small one to be taken to the recycling centre (cardboard, electrical items and bagged general waste); and a larger one for the re-use yard (curtains and rails, bedding, household gadgets, automotive bric-a-brac).

I will admit that I did occasionally catch myself muttering out loud "Oo, that'll come in handy one day!" before trudging wearily to the re-use pile and resignedly adding to its bulk. No, Tense, it hasn't come in handy for a long, long time, and if you do need it next week, well, that's just tough!

Slowly, the garage floor began to emerge into the light, with panic-stricken woodlice and spiders shading their eyes from the glare of a purgative sun. The rearranged shelving made much better use of the space and, although I've not managed to make huge inroads into the packed box conundrum, there is now room to contemplate a Final Push.

A couple of things are still perplexing me: the three metre long wooden spar that we beachcombed ages ago is still propped up in the centre of the garage; and why, when the highest tree in the garden is a willow (towering to all of one metre), do I still have a set of telescopic pruning loppers?

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