The project that was, is, and will be

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of projects, big and small. Many of them were completely successful, more or less, and others were less successful. Plenty of others were in-between being successful or not. I’ve jokingly called those “incomplete successes”, but now I have one where that’s literally true. Or, maybe it isn’t?

The second week of June, I began a project that I joked on Facebook was my “Super-Secret Project” (yes, another one…). What I was actually referring to was a project to set-up the two workbenches I have. This has been delayed ever since I moved in because I couldn’t find the bolts to assemble them, after the movers took them apart to bring them to Hamilton. I found the bolts and screws—I thought?—right after I moved in, and never saw them again (yet again, I put them "somewhere safe"). Then, the garage became more and more messy and overrun, despite my (many) periodic efforts to tidy it.

Recently, I realised the bolts were for the crossbars joining the leg assemblies along the back of the benches. The tops, I realised, were held on with screws. I have plenty of screws and bolts, so I decided to just go ahead and put the benches together with what I had on hand. I began working on that in earnest on Tuesday, June 11 (the day after I installed the mirror in my en suite), by clearing out the area where the workbenches would be going.

I finished assembling the first workbench on the Wednesday (June 12), and did the second on Thursday. There were delays when I suddenly thought I should go to the home centre to get more bolts and chipboard screws. In the end, I decided to stick with my plan to use what I already had, and that turned out fine.

This was the point at which the project morphed into a much bigger one: I decided to start clearing the garage.

I made the workbenches “Part 1” of my project, and “Part 2” was separating the stuff into four categories: Toss, Recycle, Donate/Sell, and Keep. “Toss” meant pure rubbish, things that aren’t useable or recyclable. “Recycle” is obvious. “Donate/Sell” is also obvious, but it includes packaging (wrapping, boxes, etc) for things I’ll try to sell. The final category, “Keep”, is obvious, too, but was only for stuff I’ll use or can’t part with for whatever reason (or none). Part 2 was to lead onto “Part 3”, sorting and organising what I’ll keep into clear, logical spaces/systems so I can find them again—and to log where stuff is, of course.

I hit a wall on the following Sunday when I realised I simply didn’t have enough room to properly sort things: I was basically just moving the piles of stuff around, and that meant there was simply no way I’d ever be able to clear enough space to do the organising part. I felt crushed and utterly defeated.

Nevertheless, I continued with what I was in the middle of, work that left me with a big enough open space in the garage, I thought, to take photos of some larger things I wanted to try to sell. I’ve never had that before.

The background to this is that some of the family were going to help me move boxes of stuff into a storage unit so I’d have the space I need to reorganise the entire garage—or, really, to organise it for the first time. Part of my motivation that June week was to reduce the amount of stuff that would need to be moved, though in my mind I’m sure I was imagining I’d be able to avoid using a storage unit at all. I decided that was stupid.

Part of what’s going on with me is history: Nigel and I got a storage unit when we lived on Auckland’s North Shore, with the idea it’d be temporary. We ended up moving everything to our garage in South Auckland in 2017.

We never went through the stuff we’d moved south, and in 2018 (I think) we ended up getting another storage unit close to our house. I was against that because, as I said to Nigel, “we’ll never actually go through it”. I backed him, anyway, as I always did, but, in fact, we never did go through the stuff we put in there. Fortunately, we also put very little in there before Nigel died, and I ended up using the unit to put stuff I took out of the house after the house sold (especially the contents of the garden shed). My brother in law helped me to completely clear out the storage unit when Covid allowed. I was determined to never have another storage unit.

That reality was my driving force, and I continued working on the garage—until I simply couldn’t handle it anymore. Part of that was beyond my control: It got COLD, and the garage wasn’t somewhere I wanted to spend time. Then, there was the oppressive oppressiveness of the project itself: It had been hanging over me for four and a half years, and it not being done blocked so much in my life: My workshop wasn’t set-up, so I had to way to work on projects. Being so full, the garage also gave me nowhere to put things that were inside my house so I could declutter that. It was a never-ending loop of things undone, barriers, frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, shame, and reinforcement of very negative view of myself I’ve ever had. I spiralled relentlessly downward.

In the five weeks since the last time I bothered to document my work, I’ve just tinkered a bit, doing very small tasks. Much of that lack of progress was down to to my feelings of failure, and the rest to the cold temperatures, but either way, not much has happened over the past month.

I’ve learned (I think…) to stop expecting too much of myself, because if I do I’ll inevitably be disappointed. Four and a half years of of hard physical work on that garage has yielded not much of anything, and that failure has kept me from finishing the rest of the house, too. I have no one to blame for that but myself—although, Nigel was every bit as bad as me at sorting through and getting rid of stuff, and was often actually far worse, but the point is that I didn’t get into this mess on my own.

I don’t know when the garage project will end, but my vision is clear: I want to clear enough space to be able to park my car in the garage. When that happens—and it will—there won’t be much room in there for anything else, so my original plans for organisation are gone, but it’ll be manageable until I can get rid of stuff, something that’s been my goal since I moved into this house.

The one thing I hope I’ve learned is to cut myself some slack. I’m far from perfect (shocking, I know), and things will take as much time as they take. If I do achieve my goal of being able to park in my garage, I’ll revisit this post and talk about what’s next. But I simply can’t even think about a storage unit as being part of that future. I think that will continue to be my driver in this whole stupid project.

The photo up top is me with two particular finds in the garage. First, I’m wearing safety glasses with LED spotlights Nigel bought, I think, sometime in the last year or so of his life. I found them on the floor where a workbench was going (no idea how long they've been there). Nigel used them for his many projects—and every time I saw him in them, I’d do my best Star Trek impression to say, “We are the Borg”. The thing I’m holding is something I’ve been looking for many months (a year or more?): It goes under a large outdoor planter pot so water and air can circulate underneath it, and so that water doesn't get stuck under it. I wanted it to put on the table on my patio so there was some air movement under the cover, a story in itself.