the garage and the handball wall

The boys love to play handball.  Every day when I pick Greg up from school I bring a dodgeball, and he plays for about forty minutes until we have to leave to pick up Peter and Princess at school.  He especially loves Wednesdays, because he gets out an hour earlier, and he can play for at least an hour.

Our backyard is ringed on all sides by a five foot concrete wall that would be good for handball but is not quiiiiiite high enough; we always lose balls into the neighboring yards.  On half of the left side the wall is our neighbor's garage and would be PERFECT for handball, but our neighbor has requested that we not play ball on the garage wall.

So that leaves.....our sliding glass doors!  Or our windows!  (If you look carefully you can see the two window screens that handball has dislodged from their casings; they now live in the bushes.)

The boys have complied with the neighbor guy telling them to not play on the cement wall, but completely ignore my polite requests about not slamming dodgeballs through our rented glass doors. "But Mom! I'm aiming for the wall BETWEEN the windows!"  

I discussed building a temporary handball wall out of plywood with our handyman.  The quote was a lot more than I wanted to spend on a wall I will have to remove in eight months, so the backyard is currently unavailable for handball.  I may attempt to DIY our own handball wall, but I have zero desire to sink posts into cement so that it doesn't fall on the kids or fall over in an earthquake, and then have to dig that up in a few months when we leave.

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In what I hope is the last post ever about our garage, I finished cleaning the garage.  I don't have a true picture of how the garage was filled to the brim the day we moved in, but in the middle of the process it looked like this:

After 8 gazillion subsequent rounds of purging and cleaning and more purging (you can read about unpacking and cleaning the garage here, here,and  here) I can finally park a car in the garage.  Sort of.

Essentially, I craigslisted and donated as much as humanly possible, and what we are left with is an entire wall of bins plus a few boxes annnnnd....a bunch of more stuff that doesn't fit along the wall, so I shoved it up against the wall of bins.

We should probably donate all those snow shovels, shouldn't we.

This mess is not my preferred method of organizing or storing; I prefer that things have a home.  My rule of thumb is if keep what we have space for.  Unfortunately I don't have enough wall space for the table pedestal and spare chairs  and bicycles and shop-vacs and rugs and strollers, so I am not really following my own rules here.  I will just have to suffer.

If I owned this house, I'd invest in an organization system and racks on the ceiling, but since we hope to buy a house next year, I am not investing anything into this house.  I am also reluctant to get rid of side tables and chairs and the kids' clothes.  To wit, I have purged as much as I am willing to purge at this point in time.  When we buy a new home and we move in and I figure out what we have room for, then I will do another round.  But for now, I have gone from an extremely full, overflowing garage to an approximately one-third full garage, and I am happy with that.

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Best of all?

We have a new handball court.