Nasty, yet satisfying: cleaning out the garage.

Last week's contractor work, which is actually not over yet, resulted in quite a lot of grunge yesterday. It went like this: the contractor took away the considerable pile of cabinets from out there, and offered to take away any other cardboard boxes for recycling while he was taking the cabinet boxes. We dug in and offered up a pile of boxes, in the meantime producing some tremendous yellow bags full of Styrofoam that had been in the boxes. Not many places will recycle the stuff, but I figured out that a local startup was doing an EPS collection last Saturday. So on Friday we lugged the tremendous bags in to work, where a nice coworker took them the rest of the way to Framingham in his car. And with all THAT stuff gone, it started to seem sensible to get into the garage and do a real clean-out...

Yeah, right.

I thought we didn't have much in our garage (I had even patted us on the back a few weeks ago for having space available for all those cabinet boxes)... yeah, right.

Eight big garbage bags (plus one heavy-duty contractor bag) later:

• The spider situation in the garage isn't as bad as I thought. They mostly invade the very front.
• We had nine bags' worth of trash in our not-so-full garage. Plastic, rags, sawdust, horrible old boxes, more Styrofoam and packing material, old bits of wood.... It must have seemed easier to put things out there than get rid of them, but did we really think it would be easier later when the things were grimy and disgusting?
• We left big piles of pesticide-filled sawdust out there for a while. To be specific, either three or four years. I don't know what we were thinking.
• We had pieces of a broken-down wooden ladder we found on the side of the garage when we moved in... six years ago. I pried them apart with a claw hammer and that's what's in the contractor bag.
• We have a box of really old wood stain, finishes, thinners and unidentified liquids that will have to be lugged across town on Household Hazardous Waste Day. The next one is May 8. Calendar entry created. :P

Out of all this, some good has come:

• It's clean now, and holds no more mysteries. Six years of bad karma vaporized!
• I'm sure now that one thing in the garage is mine: my bicycle. Acceptable. :)