Welcome Home Old Girl

We are world famous for our knack of filling up double garages with large amounts of stuff.  I can probably count on one hand the amount of times our actual vehicles have felt the warmth and security of a closed in space. 
Since moving to the Garden City or Shaky Town as we can now affectionately refer to it, we have very quickly filled up any designated car homes with utter crap that we don't want to throw away or even sort out (in fact I go as far as to block my ears, cover my eyes and sing the national anthem anytime the husband begins to start looking like he might want me to enter it with him) but I loudly refuse to have any of it seen in our home (bless the saying "out of sight out of mind" its my unofficial mantra) Whenever friends would venture into the portal of doom I would often hear cries of "Jesus you've got a lot of shit in here!"....9 years of doing this has suddenly gone by and after moving the 'Hoarders dream' from house to house and island to island it was finally time to face the music.  Now don't be thinking, we suddenly got all motivated and mature...O No...We always need a bit of pressure and seem to work better under it.  EQC provided us with just that.
Unfortunately due to the rat-ass earthquakes we have had and the shit-house damage they have caused, we finally had to acknowledge the existence of the husbands life project and our retirement transport, his old Kombi, which has definitely seen better days and which has been bravely sheltering in his brothers garage (its been in there for 4 years...we probably owe him a bit for storage costs or at the very least a box of beers) the garage is going to be ripped down so the old girl had to move back home with us.  The husband suggested putting her on the lawn outside our bedroom window.  Suddenly cleaning out the garage seemed like a bloody good option.  But to do this, the garage had to have a major overhaul.  And to do that we needed *a bit (translation *a lot) of help from the MIL also note that in most occasions when I use the term 'we' I mean 'he' or 'they' cause I pretty much poked my head in a couple of times, chucked out an enthusiastic "Wow!" "that's amazing!" "look at you go!" and then headed back inside.
Dump runs were a plenty, boxes were gone through just to repack into another box and then put up in the roof, there were lots of eye rolling and some huffing but the job got done.
I managed to keep lots of fun stuff for my future grandchildren (that's where the eye rolling and huffing came in) and had a very cool walk down memory lane with the teenager.

I realise we will just have to do this all over again with the stuff in the roof one day but by then maybe my kids will be raised and gone and will want to take some of the shit with them.
A Hoarding legacy for future generations.

From this.....

to this....one day!