Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It’s taken a year. Or as close as makes no difference.

Last year, I initiated a purge. As part of making the (involuntary) transition from office-jockey to a full-time work-from-home employee, I pulled my office apart, replacing the major furniture and culling the—there’s no other word for it—junk that had accreted over the years. Books, letters, electronics, avocational equipment, mementos, I put absolutely everything on the block, and a lot of it went out the door.

Out the office door, that is.

It didn’t quite make it out the front door.

Just to the garage.

My garage is unusual in two ways. It’s a generic two-car garage, on the ground floor of our ’60s split-level home; pretty standard stuff, there. What’s unusual about it is that (a) we actually keep two cars in it, and (b) it has room beyond the bays taken up by Pepper and our daily driver.

The junk from my office purge only made it to that “beyond the bays” area of the garage.

For the past year, that area has been filled with the boxes of clutter, piles of pressboard/veneer from old furniture, bags of old clothing, a few paintings that looked a hell of a lot better on eBay than they did in the living room, and an entire bookshelf of out-of-date textbooks and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica that I could not even give away. Added to this was a ring of pre-existing junk: from my watch-repair hobby, all the old music CDs that I’d ripped into digital format, manuals for tools long dead, and leftovers from every single DIY project I have undertaken in the past 20 years.

In short, it looked like a hoarder’s starter kit.

And it tasked me.

Every time I had to go down to the freezer, every time I had to squeeze my bulky frame around a pile of crap in order to get into Pepper, every time I had a repair project that needed to get done and which thus required me to clean up enough of the mess to make a new mess, every time was a knife in my usually well-ordered soul.

I hated it. Hated it. But my plans to take it all to the tip kept getting delayed and, as the piles grew, the task soon became bigger than either of our vehicles would allow, meaning multiple trips and/or renting a vehicle. Now, I’m not miserly, but spending money to rent a truck so I could go spend money to throw stuff away just . . . rankled. Vicious circle.

This month, though, we were scheduled to take delivery of a new set of furniture for our living room. There was no possible way for me to dispose of a sofa, love-seat, chair, and coffee table in my Mazda3, especially since I wanted to donate them, if possible (they were used, but in pretty good shape, especially for someone just starting out), and there was no freaking way we could just store the stuff in the garage.

Time to call in the professionals.

Seattle Rubbish Removal came to my aid. They took away all the junk from the garage (and I mean all of it), plus a couple of broken-down backyard items (BBQ, smoker), and they took our love-seat (we’d found a home for the sofa and chair). They would donate the love-seat and all the music CDs (five banker’s boxes’ worth), which was an additional plus.

That was two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve spent hours and hours down in the garage, organizing what remains. The tools and supplies were fairly easy to take care of, but then came the little stuff, the piles of screws and fasteners, the bits and pieces that my pack-rat nature thinks might be useful someday, and the kilos of watchmaking materials.

Eventually, everything found a place, and eventually, I will remember where all those places are.

For now, though, I spend most of my time down there just enjoying the calm of a clean floor and an uncluttered work-space. There’s more to do, of course—there always is—but there’s just so much more serenity in the house, in my mind, knowing that I’m rid of all that junk, that there’s a clean, well-ordered space downstairs, ready to be used to repair, build, create, grow.

k