Wow - that's a lot of wood

So, my weekend of many projects kind of happened. First and foremost, our previously un-faced cabinet now has a face and doors:

That was project #1. Took about 10 minutes (or 3.5 hours). At some point, I'll paint the new face/doors white along with all the existing cabinets, but until then, our kitchen will remain mismatched (we'll just claim it "adds character"). From there, we moved into the garage. Here's where things start to get "kind of" done. Turns out, it's a terrible idea to think one can get a whole lot of large projects done over a three day weekend when you forget that two of the three days contain your birthday and Easter. In other words, I (shockingly) over-committed myself. This, in the end, created way too much stress, and I ended up wasting what could have been wonderful family time being stressed and feeling overwhelmed. Luckily, I have an amazing and understanding wife, who put up with my super-annoying-ness - and things still got done.

As you may remember, the garage previously looked like the trash yard at your local lumber store. I knew there was a bunch of excess lumber in there, ranging from entire boards to halves of plywood sheets to bundles of 1/4-inch lath to two-foot-long sections of two-by-fours and one-by-fours. I quite possibly could have built a new garage out of the wood stored in our garage. In the end, I threw out 160 pieces of wood - that's right, 160 pieces of wood left over from various other projects. And you know what? I'm not even done. I've still got some more to clean up on the right side of the garage - and there's at least still another 300 pounds of sawdust on the floor as well. But lets not focus on what didn't happen - and instead celebrate what did. Here's what the garage looks like now:

I still need to deal with the sawdust - but I've cleaned off most of the items that were covered in sawdust, thrown out a ton of trash (along with the aforementioned wood), and organized a great deal of things. But most importantly, I turned over half of our kitchen counter-shelf into a shelf in the center of the above picture (making this space extra usable).

This adventure had a sentimental moment, as well. I'm sure you all remember the rogue stick found in the "Closet from Toledo" - well, I have found it's daddy (the rogue log) and it's cousins (the three vagrant bricks):

As with the rogue stick - I've never seen these items before. I have no idea why they were in our garage. And I can only guess that the rogue log mated with one of the 160 pieces of wood I tossed out to produce the rogue stick. I just only hope they will all be reunited some day.

So just how much crap did I throw out? Here's the visual:

The 50 gallon trash can on the right is full of some of the smaller pieces off wood, sawdust, soda cans, paper, and all the other crap I found on the ground. The middle one has most of the 160 pieces of wood that were thrown out. Leaning against the trash cans are the pieces of plywood gotten rid of, along with an almost empty bucket of joint compound and a bag of sand (a bag of sand? Come on!). The trash can on the left? Let's just say two kids in diapers poop a lot :)

And you know what's really rewarding? When you start seeing the fruits of your labors. After all the work we spent recently halving our books, it turns out we finally found a place to store our Ginny :)