Husband Follies Number 67 – Building a Man Cave

It’s that time again readers and fans of the Husband Follies series. Seriously though, for my new readers, simply enter the words “Husband Follies” in the blog’s search feature if you want a bunch of reading material that will make you giggle and laugh. That’s because my lovable and quirky husband has so many traits that are worthy of entertaining an audience.

For today’s segment, my husband Gary has had some time off from work, and he decided to be industrious and tackle the complete disarray of our garage. Like many people, we tend to just stick stuff in there, and even with both of our cars parked inside, there is still plenty of room for lots of garbage, junk, and stuff.

Most of that garbage belongs to my husband. He has screws, nails, work tools, lighting and electrical equipment, electronics, other gadgets, gizmos, doo-hickeys, and weird man-stuff. There is enough of that kind of thing to stock an average of three Home Depot stores. He collects containers to hold still more types of nuts, bolts, screws and nails. He collects all kinds of lawn and garden chemicals and garden tools, hockey stuff, extra filters, and just about anything else you can name.

Plus, we have also been using the upper deck of the garage where we have huge wire hanging (holding) containers, that hold a good amount of stuff as more storage space, even for things we do not need. Except that’s where these special toys that were the subject of my last blog were hiding, so maybe some of it will be needed eventually, like those old VHS tapes. Gary had to drag everything down from there so we could go through it all and find a better place to store, or discard some of it. (Our garage is two stories tall and in Gary’s more ambitious days when we first moved in, he wanted to build a complete storage loft for the upper part, but that never happened.)

Both Gary and I have a hard time parting with “things.” We just place importance on different kinds of things – Gary of the manly tools and fix-it variety, and me, well, we won’t go into my hoarding qualities because I have addressed that before. Just a hint that if the “thing” is anything sentimental, I will not part with it unless forced to by, say, a flood!

For Gary’s garage project, he wanted more shelves, bigger and deeper shelves, and he wanted places for his insurance brochures and materials – tons of that stuff. He wanted a work desk, and he wanted an easy space for our bikes because in the past with the cars parked inside, it was treacherous to get them out.

In other words, Gary wanted to transform our garage into a man-cave and a functional, if still full-of-garbage, storage space where we could still comfortably park both of our cars. After all, isn’t a garage’s actual function for the parking of cars?

For weeks he worked in there, mostly in shorts and flip flops, using all of his manly tools. One day after working in there for a while, next I found him sprawled across our couch with an ice pack on his foot. He was cursing out his stupidity in using a huge electric saw and other heavy equipment while wearing flip flops!

That injury healed quickly and he was once again in the business of transforming the space, once again while wearing flip flops.

Now the project is mostly complete except for a bunch of stuff he tried to “sell” that he now has to haul off to a donation place. (But those items are somewhat tucked away- let’s see how long it actually takes to get rid of them.) It is all looking very impressive and while for me personally, it is still somewhat of visual abstract of where things needed might be, everything has a well-organized space or shelf. You just have to know WHERE to FIND the thing, and that’s where Gary comes in. He has memorized the location of everything.

Gary now has every guy’s dream in the garage: a work desk, stools with a back, and a work light overhead. He has a major tool chest that rolls, instead of the several big toolboxes he used to have. He has a hockey equipment drying area – that in of itself is quite impressive compared to just laying stuff on a table after his hockey games to air out.

In other words, the man-cave is complete, and Gary is a happy camper. I am happy for the neater space and everything being organized. Sometimes his plan and vision is not really understandable but he sure can get it executed! You can see that in the photo below. Thanks to Gary who actually utilized his time off to do something worthy!