Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter-productivity. --Erma Bombeck

This is not an exaggeration.

Not Erma Bombeck's statement about housework, although I feel that was right-on-the-mark as well, but rather what I'm going to tell you.

I repeat: this is not an exaggeration. (I felt I must repeat the disclaimer because, as you may have figured out, I can be prone to exaggerate. But you came here to read a story, right?)

Now that I've digressed again, I'm going to repeat it once more for impact: I am not exaggerating.

You could eat off
my mother's garage floor.*

True. Call any of my siblings to verify.

(*I feel I should back up this claim with a few facts. [1] Her garage floor is painted. [2] They mop it a lot. [3] The car is parked on a rubber mat off to one side and therefore never touches the garage floor.)

Now that our garage sale should be just a memory . . . I had an email from my sister asking if everything is cleaned up and the garage is parkable again.

Sadly, no.

About half-of-the-half of the stuff we didn't sell is still there waiting for me to do something about it. The other half is already boxed and ready for a trip to Goodwill.

But what is unbelievable (not to mention shameful) is that after all the junk people carted out of here last weekend,
WE STILL HAVE THIS MUCH STUFF LEFT IN THE GARAGE.

I'm having a hard time getting motivated to finish the job. Perhaps if there were something more exciting than a parking space waiting at the other end . . .

My mother tried to explain to me one day that "the garage is an extension of the house and therefore a housekeeper should keep it just like she does her house" (which actually explained some things about my kitchen floor, but I didn't feel like my mother would understand that so I kept it to myself).

But perhaps I should listen to her wisdom more often.

For instance, I really enjoy decorating my house (which could account for the over-accumulation of stuff) -- maybe I could direct my design attention to the garage and make it a hobby.


A good example of how a plain looking garage door can be treated for eye appeal.

Hannah recently pointed out some swell ideas for applying decorative skills to the garage when she was perusing my stack of old "Popular Mechanics" magazines.


"Nested" paneling applied to daring Chinese-red door carries out striking modern design of this swank garage.


Nine "picture frames" add the final decorative touch to this plain one-piece, upward acting garage door.


Two vertical groupings of bevel-edge blocks provide another simple and attractive garage door treatment.


Frames within frames applied vertically provide an effective treatment for decorating any garage door.


The directions look simple enough, don't you think? What more instruction would I need?


I could also transform our plain shutters to match, since I sold my collection of decorative shutters at the garage sale and need to start my collection again from scratch . . .

I can only imagine what our 3-car-garage doors would look like covered in enormous random polka-dots.

I think I'd better check my homeowner's covenants. My neighbors may prefer looking at our rag-tag car collection to the
Susan Hinckley-izing of our home exterior.


One of my favorite children's stories is by
the extraordinary Leo Lionni


and is titled "The Biggest House in the World."

I hope you're familiar with it -- if you're not, stop by the library and pick up a copy because it is a fable so appropriate to the
age we live in (or at least the house I live in).



In the story, a little snail is fantasizing about how he'd like his shell to become "the biggest house in the world", complete with all kinds of fancy details and additions.

His father convinces him that this would be unwise, because the snail would be unable to carry such a monstrosity, and if he couldn't move he would eventually wither and die.

The moral of the story is,

Keep your house light
and easy to carry.

I've read that story a hundred times, but I couldn't find our copy today because it's buried somewhere in the storage room, behind a door we don't really dare open for fear of possible disaster.

I'm not proud of any of this, I'm just putting it out there.

You know, see if I'm alone in the universe . . . maybe feel better about myself until I get at least one of our cars pulled back in the garage.

I think we may have a problem that no amount of decoration or design can fix.




And I obviously can't
blame my mother. She
raised me better.

Don't you hate
when that happens?





(Note: I have realized that a professional illustrator's rendition of your parents can come in quite handy when illustrating your self-absorbed blog. I'd recommend everybody get one.)