The Myth of the Garage

Gordon Clay here. Years ago I wrote a piece called the Myth of the Garage. It was based on years of observation and questioning. Talking with dozens of people to see if anyone knew what a garage was for. The only consistent answer that people could come up with is a family myth that was passed down through the generations that it was originally to house a car. And, as the suburbs grew and more families needed two cars, the garages grew as well. The only caveat was that no one remembers ever seeing a car in the garage, much less two. What they had were boxes of stuff, some marked, many not. There's even a TV show about whole homes being taken over by stuff when the garage was too full to get into.

I know one man who moved into a smaller place after his divorce and rented out a storage unit to keep all his extra stuff. Six years later he moved into a home with a garage. He went through his stuff in storage, and wound up not keeping one single thing. He had paid over $6,000 to store what became boxes of useless stuff.

What if we outlawed the use of storage units. What if you were required to keep all of your acquired stuff in your home or apartment. What if you had to get ride of something if you bought something new.

Hopefully we would all have less clutter in our lives and more time to enjoy life rather that shuffle around and trip over stuff. Maybe we could actually clear away enough stuff to use the garage for what it is rumored it was designed for - a car.