Garage Banned
Yesterday morning Kristi called to tell me that, finally, the garage was coming down.We bought our house in February of 1998. In the middle of winter, in Minnesota, it was a little difficult to do things like inspect the alley-side foundation footings of a garage, seeing as the snow was deep and (since the house was unoccupied) largely unshoveled. So it really wasn't until spring that we got a decent sense of what kind of shape the garage was in.
Lousy.
The footings were crumbling. Although it was ostensibly a two-car garage, one side was nearly unusable because of a concrete ramp that had been built from a point on the driveway up to the lawn, right in front of the door. Only one door had an opener, and it didn't work. The back wall of the garage had been extended with a lean-to for a longer car at some point, and the roof and walls of the lean-to were in bad shape. Strange vining weeds grew through and spread across the cracked concrete floor and ancient scrap-carpet dripcatcher. It vaguely felt like something out of a Stephen King novel, something somehow alive, and just a little bit malevolent.
Kristi rarely used the garage as a parking place, and after a while, I stopped too. It became a storage place for things bound to the dump or yard sales or whatever. And eventually, those things just stayed there. For years.
We'd talked about replacing it for a long time. We'd also talked about remodeling the kitchen. Ultimately, the garage won.
Yesterday morning Sussel took a backhoe and tore the roof open. According to Kristi, the whole garage just sort of imploded. Unfortunately, no photographic record exists of the carnage. By the time I got home at 3:30, the entire back of our lot, property line to property line, was a reasonably flat chunk of clay, separated from our lawn by a large berm of more clay.
So in a few weeks we're going to have a new, big garage, with a little extra space for workshop and bikes (and crap bound for the dump or yard sales or whatever). But I have to say: I'm going to miss the old one just a little. I'm sure it wasn't really evil.
posted by MeanMrMustard @ 7:16 AM
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