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Cleanliness is elusive for well-used garage
(by Lauri Gross - June 22, 2011)
VITAL TRIFLE, BY LAURI GROSS
Cleanliness is elusive for well-used garage
My brother and sister-in-law have a spotless garage. Not a speck of dirt on the floor. Not a cobweb to be seen. Gleaming windows. Flawless drywall. There are even white throw pillows on two plastic chairs near the front, in what could be considered a sitting area, complete with framed pictures and a furniture-grade shelving unit.
It's not that they need this space to double as living area. Their large home is occupied only by them and their three cats. Their three spotless cars each sit in their own bay, with plenty of space to walk around and between them.
In our garage, like my brother's, our cars fit easily in our bays, and there is plenty of room to walk around and between them. But the similarity ends there. While our garage is free from clutter, it is certainly not free from dirt. I used to think our garage was so dirty, because we kept the tractor, the push mower, the rakes, shovels and ladders in there. But we have moved those items to an outbuilding, and still the dirt finds its way in.
I use a large push broom to sweep debris out of the garage, but it just comes back. Sometimes it comes back even as I am sweeping it out. It catches a breeze as it leaves my broom and swirls up enough to sting my eyes, so I close them for a second. When I open them again, I see that the dirt has all blown back in. I try again. This time the dirt does not blow into my eyes. Instead, the wind waits till I inhale, so it goes in my mouth. The result is the same. The dirt is still in the garage.
Last fall I made a truly concerted effort to sweep out the garage. I ran the broom along the walls, ridding them of the spider webs I could reach. I delved into corners. I moved the bikes and the garbage can to clean behind those. When I was done, it did look somewhat better, though still not safe for someone wearing white.
When winter hit, the usual winter dirt arrived. As anyone in Northeast Ohio knows, each time you pull a car into the garage, you bring with it four tires full of black grit. Granted, that black grit helps keep us safe on the snowy roads, but it doesn't do us any favors in our garage or in our home, where it is inevitably tracked. Each entry and exit from the garage tracks in more black grit. At the end of last winter, such a mound of grit had accumulated under each of our tires that we could have shimmied underneath to change the oil without putting the cars on ramps first.
So my daughter and I cleaned it. We shoveled and swept and hosed out the offending dirt. It was a filthy job, and it was freezing as we worked. The driveway was still covered in snow and surrounded by the huge banks left by the plow. Little by little, we won the battle against all that black filth. We stood back, admiring our work, even though we knew winter still had a good bit of fight left in its belly and there would be plenty more black grit to come.
Meanwhile, my son and three friends began work on a school project in our garage. It involved 4-by-8-foot sheets of 1 1/2-inch thick plastic foam and power tools. You know where this story is going. The garage became a cloud of plastic foam bits. A veritable Milky Way of foam floated in my garage. Then gravity claimed each of the 10 trillion bits and settled them gently on the garage floor, where they formed an unavoidable layer of white.
Soon the plastic foam bits entered our house. As feet ran in and out of the garage, the foam came too. Shoes were dumped in the mudroom, but somehow the plastic foam spread farther than that. For weeks, my life became a cycle of sweeping and vacuuming and chasing those foam bits.
When I was feeling nearly defeated, I realized the help I needed was sitting on a shelf in our basement. I hauled up the shop vac and cleaned that garage like there was no tomorrow. Neither foam bits nor black grit were any match for our trusty shop vac. It went into corners, it covered the floor in wide seeping motions, it made quick business of cobwebs and even pulled out the dirt hiding in the gaps between concrete floor slabs. It was all I could have hoped for. Not only did the garage look clean, it felt cleaner under your feet, and best of all, we would not track dirt into the house from the garage anymore.
Well, at least not until the following week, when my son and his friends continued work on their project and I had to get out the shop vac again. After a few more cycles like this, I felt I was actually making progress. Winter ended, and the grit stopped coming. The plastic foam became just a bad memory.
I know that each season will bring its own dirt into our garage, but, in the meantime, I may just go out and get some white pillows and set out some chairs next to my Honda.
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