Jack ‘n Tracie

We’ve officially owned our home for three months today. And our garage has been a mess the entire three months. It started out a mess because we unpacked what we needed during the heatwave we had the week we moved and left the rest in the garage. Whenever something we needed has come up missing, one of us would venture out into the garage, find the box and either take what we needed out and leave the still unpacked box there. We’ve been so busy just doing yard work and kid stuff that we kept putting off the garage, till today.

Another reason it was a mess is because Jack has hundreds of “things”. From tools big and small, (like 39 different screwdrivers, I swear there was one or more in EVERY box!) to cd’s, music equipment, computer paraphernalia, game cd’s, books…. well I could go on but that would probably max out the limit of space I have here at my domain… lol :love: Keep in mind that he also has his own room (huge room) upstairs for all of his music and computer equipment.

Lets put this into perspective: at our old house (the one in Orchards) he had all his stuff in the nice-sized garage. And it was packed in there. Barely room to move around in. No way you’d get a car in there either. When we moved to the apartment, we never managed to clean up the garage to where we could use it for any kind of function other than a catch-all. Because it was half the size of our garage at our last house, there was just no way for Jack to set up or unpack all his things (he tried more than once).

So now we have a nice spacious house where Jack can spread his stuff out over both the garage and “his” room. Today it dawned on me that I have lived with most of my own personal stuff in boxes for YEARS. Beside regular household stuff and what’s crammed on my desk, my personal belongings have been in boxes and stored in closets or crawl spaces for years and years.

Today as we were cleaning out the garage, I told Jack, “it must be nice to have your own room and garage to work out of now” and then I thought to myself, wait a minute, why don’t I have a chunk of this huge house for myself? The kids have their room and Jack has his room(s), and we have our bedroom, but I don’t have any space for ME except for my desk, which is always overflowing… I went into the den and looked at my pathetic desk, then I looked in the laundry room and at the pathetic shelves ready to buckle under the weight of my old photo albums and now all my Watkins business stuff. I looked in the bedroom in the closet where my stuff was still in the same boxes they’ve been in for so long…

So I went to Jack and told him I wanted my own space. His face lit up as it dawned on him as well that I’ve never really had my own space and he immediately went to work clearing out a huge space in the garage for me. He anchored some shelves next to a counter for me. Then he found some extra flooring material that was used in our bathroom and covered the counter with that for me. He hung two more shelves above that and cleared out the space under the counter. As a final touch he gave me one of his bookshelves to put on the other side of the counter for my books. I was so excited! I unpacked many of my old boxes and decorated the area with pictures of my kids (there’s never a shortage of those) and family. I have a nice-sized stack of shelves to store all my Watkins inventory and business stuff, and a place to work and make phone calls if needed, a place to see all my books and a place under the counter to store all my pictures and the scrapbooking materials I’ve been meaning to actually work on. Now I’ll have a place to do it besides the dining room table!

He said if I wanted, he could enclose the space and it could even be private. And he offered to set up one of his laptops out there. I said no at first, but the idea is starting to appeal to me. The space is big enough that if he DID close it off, I could set up a small couch and maybe a throw rug for the kids to play on while I worked. And it also might work out better for when I’m doing my other job for a quieter place to take calls. The best part is it doesn’t cut into his space at all and we still have room for the car.

It might sound silly that I’m so excited but I think this is really neat and it’s kinda fun having my own “room” to do whatever I want with. And I absolutely adore my husband. It’s so cool to me that he saw that I wanted something and dropped what he was doing to give me exactly what I wished for at the blink of an eye. :loveu: