no i'm not talking about the one in washington, i'm talking about my garage. it's stuffed to the brim of treats and tools and grease and smells like gasoline and cut grass but i love it. the clutter tells a story of my father who is a do-it-yourself type guy (really he takes this to the extreme sometimes), of state football games (there's way too much tailgating gear), and of generations past. i could spend days in this garage exploring and listening to my dad's stories of where everything came from and what it is.
today i spent my time "restoring" and old dresser set for my room next year. i cleaned it and sanded it and re-stained it and i am very proud of my work! we had to move some stuff around to get it out and i was asking my dad about an old pantry type thing we have. it came from his dad's house when he was a kid (this would be john anderson white jr.) and it was the neatest thing. it had the coolest little instrument inside for crushing your ice, which would've been very necessary had i not lived in a time of crushed ice refrigerators. and and contraption that held your flour, you pulled it out and sifted it through whenever you needed to use flour. the top was full of old mason jars that we used to catch fireflies in (some were teal, i didn't even need to go to the flea market) and the insulators that used be on top of the telephone poles. how cool? they were glass and you could see where the wires would wrap around them. what a neat antique to have. something else i've always loved is the maola milk clock that just keeps on ticking. it's over one of the "work desks" which is so full of stuff you can't see. it's such a cool clock.
but my all time favorite thing in the garage is the 1961 volkswagen beetle. it's black, and right now it's in pretty rough shape but i bet back in her glory days she was a beauty. when we were little she used to run, not wonderfully always but we would beg dad to drive us around in her. there's a hole in the rusty floor behind the passenger's seat and whenever we were with our friends we would tie a ribbon, hang it out the bottom and watch it run along the road. this was dad's family's car growing up. i don't know how him and uncle bo could stand squeezing in the back of that thing together, i can barely sit next to missy in the trail blazer which is huge. the "trunk" is in the hood and engine is in the "trunk" which is interesting. one time they took the bug all the way up to canada. imagine all those bags, guess they had to pack light, not sure if my grandma would've liked that. luckily there was a luggage rack, but i'm assuming that held the bike of the injured hick hiker they picked up on the way. that's a story for the books. dad, uncle bo, their parents, and a canadian hick hiker all crammed into a little tiny black bug, i would've loved to see that. dad always talks about fixing it up, and he's done small projects before. but now she's just sitting in the garage, no license plate or anything (which reads 61 VW). he said it's time to make the final decision, either go all out and fix her up, or sell her. i hope he doesn't sell her, although when she was in the driveway we got plenty of people knocking on the door wanting to buy her, but we always said she wasn't for sell. i would love to keep the bug, get her running again and show her off to my kids. plus the garage just wouldn't be the same without her in it.
here she is in white, without and luggage rack (and with a sunroof).
i'm also so excited about my teal mason jars that i got from the flee market. my plan is to put them on top of this awesome old chest that my dad found for me at a yard sale with candles inside, i love candles. the chest is quite beautiful i think, it may be my favorite thing for the room. we touched it up a little bit and it looks as good as new.
