Empower Network

What is a garage? Theoretically, it is a fairly redundant extension of your house, larger than any room and designed specifically to shelter our vehicles. When our vehicles are not in their shelter, the garage could be defined simply as wasted space. However, in fact, this so-called wasted space is much more than an enclosed area of some 400 square feet. True the lighting usually does little to set an evocative mood, and the stained concrete floor is cold and unyielding at best. And yet, despite all its shortcomings, we find that its endless uses make it possibly one of your house’s greatest assets.

Just think what we keep in there besides our vehicles. Looking around my own garage it seems that every pile of junk tells a story. Our garden shed is full of old furniture and so we store all our garden tools in the garage. This includes the rake with the loose handle, the hedge trimmer that jammed last Spring and hasn’t worked since, and an assorted collection of misshapen snow shovels. There are at least three chests of drawers, long discarded and stuffed to capacity with things like irregular lengths of copper wire, old extension cords, tops of coffee pots (you never know when you might run across a bottom) and plastic bags full of hardware for obsolete curtain rails.

In another corner we discover two large trunks, one filled with kids’ dress-up clothes, some of which I could swear used to hang in my closet, and the other containing boxes and boxes of  jigsaw puzzles each with at least one piece missing. With the rest of the garage occupied by broken power tools, a folded eight by four table covered with linoleum, half-finished projects, old school books, a locked toolbox for which I do not have the key and boxes of miscellaneous UJOs (Unidentified Junk Objects), this could never ever be defined as wasted space.

Let’s redefine this as a very important catch-all room, in which your car takes second place to encapsulated family histories and which, unlike any other room in the house, even has its own remote door opener. That fact alone must make it a special place.

Garage Sales Rule

As if all this wasn’t enough, the humble garage actually doubles as a kind of personal thrift store. There are few people indeed who have not had the ‘delightful’ experience of organizing and participating in a garage sale (it’s actually not that bad and could result in a fun family event). You take yet another look around your garage space and suddenly something snaps and you are overwhelmed with the desire to courageously make some real changes.

Sure you could fill up your trailer and dispatch the UJOs to the nearest Salvation army depot but along with your urge to purge, arises your latent entrepreneurial instincts, probably prompted by the nagging knowledge that you could really do with new kitchen counters and a paint job in the living room and your finances are a little stretched.

Now you can find a use for your linoleum-covered table and before you know it you have neatly arranged most of your UJOs on it with prices perfectly designed for negotiation by savvy customers. You have your float ready for giving change; you spend valuable time posting signs in conspicuous places around the neighborhood; a carefully worded ad has been inserted in the local rag and you are ready to wheel and deal.

If the weather holds up you find cars parked outside your house well in advance of the opening time. These early birds are seasoned, perennial garage sale visitors. They know exactly what they want and are experts in the art of negotiation: “I”ll give ya ten bucks for the bike but throw in the kids’ pedal car” or “That old sewing machine isn’t worth fifty bucks”, followed by a deliberate walk away with a disbelieving head shake. At the end of the day this same disbeliever will return and seeing that the sewing machine is not sold comes in with a low-ball offer of twenty five big ones which he knows you will eagerly accept without flinching too much.

After the event you surprise yourself when you discover that you do in fact have a substantial down payment for those new kitchen counter tops , and the unsold stuff can still go to the Sally Ann or the dump. Your big room goes back to its original functions but with a lot more room for growth and change.

Do you have room for growth and change in your life? Click HERE to discover what to do next.

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