No, I don’t mean the day I quit wearing my angel flight polyester slacks and platform shoes (although that would qualify) I mean the day Chris and I got the stank outta the garage...
Last weekend he and I spent the day cleaning and organizing the garage. No small feat when you consider we have 2 families worth of junk...I mean stuff...in there. It was only after we cleaned the garage, and realized the stink was still there, that I began to worry.
All week long, I’ve been stressing about this smell thing. Wondering if I was going to end up pulling down the sheetrock and everything to try and find something that was obviously dead, and obviously in the advanced stages of decomposition. I spent hours awake at night (ok, maybe not hours) trying to think about how something may have gotten in the garage and just what that something might be.
At one point, I even debated whether or not to just procrastinate it away. Afterall, assuming it was a little ole mouse, once it was done decomposing, it would dry up and quit stinking right??? Right??? See, that’s the problem, I wasn’t totally sure it would dry up and stop stinking and I wasn’t totally sure it was a little ole mouse.
So, Saturday morning, after a nice big breakfast (Chris’ logic was that after seeing dead stuff we probably wouldn’t want to eat so we’d better do our eating early – either that or he really wanted to see me hurl) we headed out in search of the source of the funk.
I had pretty much figured, through my ultra keen sense of smell, that it was somewhere at the front of the garage and most likely under my workbench. The problem is, the workbench was left by the previous owner. And not out of generosity either, it was left because he built it in the garage sometime around 50 years ago and it weighs a ton!
Well, we huffed and we puffed and we pushed and we shoved and eventually we got the thing pulled away from the wall only to find that there was nothing behind it...it was nice and clean actually.
So, that done, we moved over to the little bench on the corner that my toolbox sits on and had just begun moving stuff off of it when Chris looked down and there it was...the source of the funk...a dead possum...and yes, I know that possums play possum and are sometimes not as dead as they seem, but with the smell coming out of this guy, he was beyond playing possum and actually dead.
Once we had disposed of the little guy, soaked the entire area with about a quart of pine-sol disinfectant, and put everything back where it belonged, we had to figure out how he got in there in the first place.
Usually when I’m in the garage, the door is up. Chances are though, he didn’t saunter in when I was out there. Also, there aren’t any holes large enough for him to have crawled through, so the only thing I could think of was that since the side door doesn’t always close all the way when you pull it (just try to find a square door/doorframe in this place) he must have gone in one night when I thought I had closed the door well but obviously hadn’t.
You can see where this is leading...just like every project I’ve ever started it was going to take twice as long and be twice as expensive as I originally planned. Especially since I had now decided to hang a new door.
I’m pretty sure that putting in a new door correctly is one of those things people are genetically predisposed to be able to do. Kind of like being artistic, having a gift for languages or being able to dance and not look like an idiot. I’m also pretty sure that like the aforementioned skills, it’s NOT something I personally am predisposed to be able to do.
So it was, that as the sun set, Chris and I hung the door for the 50th and final time, closed, latched it and went in search of beer...Finally, a garage that is clean, doesn’t stink and that I can hang out in when the house is going insane. (now, where did I put the keys to the new doorlock?)
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