August 2013: Garage, August 10, 2013

I learned something early this morning: the garage scraping has to end.  I can't do it.  I woke up with severe wrist pain from carpal tunnel syndrome.  Normally, when I wake up with that severe of pain, I can get it to calm down quickly (I found what works best for me is to let the arm dangle) and put my wrist brace on.  Yes, it's happened before (in fact, it happened Friday morning).  The difference this time is nothing was calming down the intense pain, and I already had the wrist brace on.  That's not good at all if my wrist pain is getting that severe.  I was at the Carver County Fair today (my cousin called and said they had an extra ticket) and my aunt and dad's cousin were putting on a quilting demonstration, and I really wanted to help, but I knew I'd get about two stitches in and not be able to feel my hand, so I declined.  It was sad.

So I knew when I got home, I couldn't scrape paint off my garage.  Do you know how frustrating this is?  So, I decided to take my rainy-day plan, and clean inside the garage.  It needs it.  I mean, this is more or less right in front of the door--I can still park in the other half of the garage, because I'm lucky enough to have a two-car garage.

Some time ago, I cut up a lot of cardboard in my garage, and piled it up here, but I never actually did anything about it, so it's sorta messily piled now, with stuff on top of it.  Ohhhh, and that's not even a true before picture, because I wrapped the extension cord (imagine 150' of extension cord all tangled up on the floor here!) before I remembered to take pictures and start my timer.  (And my timer got all messed up because I put my phone in my pocket without locking the screen, and it started pushing weird buttons.  But I'm pretty sure it was about a half-hour in total work.)

I piled up the cardboard and tied it with rope from re-doing my cats' scratching posts, threw away a lot of pots that my plants came in, folded the tarps, and in general took care of little things.  Now all I have to do is bring the cardboard out to the street next recycling day!

Further back in my garage was a lot cans and bottles I'd throw out of my car when I'd realize they were cluttering things up.  On the plus side, it keeps my car neater.  On the minus side, it doesn't do much for my garage!

I picked up the bottles and put them in the recycling bin, and I picked up the cans and immediately crushed them with my can crusher.  Ahhh...much better!

And there's a start to cleaning my garage.  We'll see what I get done in the near future.  I will be renting the pressure washer next week to remove the paint entirely, I guess.  It's really too bad.  There were areas of the garage I was looking forward to scraping because the paint scrapes nicely and it's fun to see progress like that.  But sometimes, you have to listen to your body, or you will pay for it.  In the wee hours of the morning.