The South’s Extra Rooms

For over twenty years we have been downsizing. When we moved off of the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia, our garage was overflowing with stuff that apparently we could not let go. We were there for over three years and never got a car in the garage. We swore that we would never let that happen again and we haven’t.
What we have done is make full use of the garages that have been attached to our houses since Halifax. While we struggled to find a good backyard, we have mostly had great garages. In our Roanoke garage I built a set of really nice cabinets for my hand and yard tools. In our Cape Carteret garage there was room for my big work bench. When we moved to Mocksville, I had to make the square workbench into two rectangular ones.
However, the point about garages isn’t that you can put a workbench in there or turn it into a temporary shop. The real magic is that you can do almost anything with your garage in the South. Ours often turns into a potting room. One year we grew what I called wagon train tomatoes. Their base was the garage. By bringing the tomatoes inside during the cold weather and putting them outside when the sun was shining, we managed to have home grown tomatoes for twelve straight months. Only the January and February ones were a little marginal on the real tomato taste. The garage was not a greenhouse but it was a safe house on cold nights.
My biggest garage project was building a custom desk for my office.

I put it together and finished it in the garage. I built the desk with connectors that allowed me to take it apart which I needed to do in order to get it to my office three stories up. When I got it up the stairs piece by piece, I put it back together and added a drawer. I could never have done my desk without the garage.
Our Cape Carteret garage had a door at the back. If you kept the garage door open and the back door open, there was a wonderful breeze most days coming off the water.
We have always kept a couple of chairs in the garage. In the South, a chair in the shade of the garage has often been a life saver. When you are almost cooked from mowing a yard, having a chair in the garage keeps you from making the near fatal mistake of going into the air conditioned house. It will feel like a meat locker if you make the mistake of going inside before cooling down. Sitting in the garage shade increases the odds you will safely cool off and get back to mowing. A water bottle with some ice is an essential accessory.
When I go for a walk in the morning or go feed the birds and check my rain gauge, I always stop when I come back into the garage and sit for a few minutes just observing the world.
Tonight when I was sitting, I smelled the rain and for the first time this year, it had that distinctive smell of summer rain.
While we hope to get a shed someday, for now the garage does pretty well meeting all our needs. It is double garage, but we only manage to have room for one car. In the garage the only rules are mine except my wife loves to putter around in there. She would rather use her little blower in the garage than a vacuum cleaner in the house.