Remodeling: A Clean Sweep . . . of the ‘Hard’ Junk

After several false starts, we are finally going to build two bedrooms and a bath over our garage. I was against it from the start, but I have deferred to my wife’s wishes, and I have promised not to complain if things go wrong.

Of course they will go wrong. It is axiomatic that remodeling takes twice as long and costs twice as much as one expects.

I didn’t think we would ever actually do it because there was one insurmountable obstacle. We would have to clean the garage out--completely, to allow for foundation work.

It was my opinion, and still is, that cleaning out the garage will be an impossible task. There is too much accumulation of junk. Too many years. We have cleaned it out at least twice before, but those times were superficial. We never really got down to the real hard junk.

We have made a start. The difficulties are already apparent. What to give to the Goodwill, what to keep, and what to throw out. Our contractor has promised to set up a shed in our back yard for the stuff we want to keep, and also to hire a junk man to carry off the trash.

My wife and I are of two different minds. I want to throw everything out. Lighten ship. I see no reason for going into the future burdened by the impedimenta of the past. I try to set a good example. I remember the trauma, the last time, when I sent my Marine Corps tunic to the Goodwill. It didn’t prompt any similar sacrifices by her.

Already I have emptied my shelves and filled six cartons with books to give away. They include almost the complete Nero Wolf stories of Rex Stout. I’ve read them twice already. Also, I am giving away about 100 records, from Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter to Mozart, Bach and Handel. In the house we have hundreds of records we never play. Our evenings are devoted almost entirely to sex and violence on television.

Also, I am thinking of throwing out the scrap books in which, for 20 years, my wife faithfully pasted my columns. They have served their purpose. The past is past. It will hurt, and it will hurt her, but I must be ruthless.

I am also going to throw out all the plaques I have won over the years for this imaginary achievement or that. I don’t mean to disparage them, but I don’t wish to display them, and what good are they in the dark of the garage?

The problem is that my wife has no such steel. She can’t bring herself to part with anything. She has at least 50 baskets. I have no idea how she collected them. I have no idea why she wants to keep them. They take up an enormous amount of space. She also has boxes full of cloth, which she expects to make into dresses some day. Meanwhile she buys everything she wants mail order and hasn’t made a dress in years.

I did score one triumph. She opened a trunk and found it full of her old hats. Once, trying to take control, I had driven that trunk to the dump and started to throw the hats away. I did throw one straw away. It sailed out into the dump like a UFO. I was stricken by remorse. After all, the hats belonged to her. I brought the trunk back and put it in the garage.

“I thought you threw all these away,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Just one.”

Now that she’s found them, you think she’s going to throw those hats away? No chance.

“She opened a drawer and found a stack of my old notebooks. Years of them. Why had I ever saved them? They had already served their purpose. Now the notes were gibberish. I couldn’t even remember what they related to. Here and there I found some banal platitude which I evidently thought was profound at the time: “Heaven may be paradise, but getting there is half the fun. . . . When you’re young, goodby means only till tomorrow. . . . Man is a comic animal. . . . Time flied out. . . .”

Now, at last, it was all going into some landfill. At least my scrapbooks and notebooks are biodegradable.

What I have to watch out for is that she doesn’t try to save my books, records, scrapbooks, plaques and notebooks when my back is turned. I’m afraid they’ll all turn up in that temporary shed, and find their way back into the garage.

The price of a light ship is eternal vigilance.

Speaking of platitudes.