There isn't much if you don't own a house. Unfortunately, the obvious follow up is, if you live in a big city, there aren't many houses. Even more unfortunately, the next step is that the houses there are tend to be expensive, and even then, the garages aren't terribly large or are still non-existent. Take, for instance, the area surrounding my apartment. There are beautiful craftsman houses with great gardens and gorgeous architecture... with practical and efficient cars sitting outside of them. Pity.
It's a good day, then, when you happen upon a house that's only about ten minutes away from you, has a three car garage, and is inhabited by an owner who likes you a lot and never uses it anyway. Jackpot, yeah? I'd say so. The only catches are that I have to help him build a workbench, and I have to help him organize the garage before I can use it. Works out anyway- I can't really use the garage unless there's space to do so. It's not even a terribly Herculian task, either. A lot of the clutter which is clogging his garage consists of tools, and a lot of those same tools are ones I can use for my various projects: shop vac, air compressor, chop saw, table saw, etc. So I happily agreed, got a key, and have occasionally been swinging by to check on my Cub(s) and my workspace.
Today I started to step it up a bit, when I noticed that my friend1 had some sawhorses, some planks of wood, and a bunch of little things that could easily fetch some kind of decent price at the garage sale he's been thinking about having to help with the junk-clearing. I made a quick table and started grabbing. I found a violin, a Eureka bagless vacuum, what appear to be two reasonably good condition DVD players, and an older model flat panel computer monitor lying around on the top of the stuff. Hopefully at least a few more things will pop up, though I sense that most of it will wind up fetching a couple bucks at best. We'll see. Perhaps I'll add some junk of my own and share proceeds. Perhaps a bake sale is in order.
In any case, I didn't just spend the time looking at vacuums and screens- I did actually examine the bikes a bit more thoroughly than I've had a chance to so far. I discovered several things of interest, too. First, the bike in the better condition, which we'll call Cub, does not have working brakes of any kind because the front is out of adjustment, and the rear is missing a bolt that helps brace the assembly against the frame. The deteriorated frame, which we'll call Spare, actually has the bolt and washer. Similarly, the transmission doesn't shift properly on Cub but does on spare, Cub is missing a speedo and Spare has one, the headlight mount ring and lens for Cub are going to come off of Spare, and Spare has already donated her driver footpegs to the cause as well. It'll be nice to pull so many parts off of Spare to get Cub running again, since it'll ultimately save me a bit of cash. When I go to clean her up to resell later on, I'll probably replace a bunch of these parts anyway for appearances, but for bare-bones street legal status, I don't expect a huge bill. And just to get the engine turning won't be too difficult, I don't think.
That said, let's examine what needs to happen in the next couple of weeks:
- Throw away all obvious garbage and unsellable junk in the garage.
- Find and marshal all sellable junk into its own space.
- Price and tag said junk
- Organize tools and materials into their own separate areas and begin finding space for everything.
- Move larger objects (work bench, table saw, shelving) around to suit my space needs and maintain an area for at least one car.
- Plan and schedule a yard sale.
-The Proprietor
1Since my goal is for this blog to reach people that potentially neither one of us knows, I'm not going to mention his name until I remember to ask if it's ok. You wouldn't want me blabbing about the condition of your garage to a bunch of strangers, right?
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