Just before we start, a word of advice for the innocent – do not renovate, ever. Just do not do it.
We live in an old timber house, really old, in fact ancient. We should have pulled it down years ago. It is held together by structural paint.
It was bought around 40 years ago. All the other prospective buyers intended to demolish and start afresh. Only one idiot saw the potential and kept the shell. Back in those days, excited at the start of the home ownership journey, we renovated with a new kitchen and bathroom. With no money we of course did it on the cheap.
Then when the trampoline floors demanded some re-stumping, we did it again.
Later, when the kitchen was inadequate and we had more cash, we upgraded, and threw the dice for what was supposed to be the last time.
Now approaching statutory senility and noticing that presumptuous young people offer to give up their seat on the bus for me, and instead of being sensible and moving house, taking the opportunity to join the growing band of downsizers, we have invited the builders in again on the basis that this is forever. Next stop is a pine box.
Which leads us to the garage.
Or, as it has become, the local self-storage option for the impenetrable pile of detritus that was previously the entire contents of our home … our life in boxes and bags. Piled up in wobbly stacks that threaten to engulf my cars.
Like many readers of this august journal, my garage is my special place. My sanctuary. Where I retire to when the world’s contradictions and cruelties threaten to overwhelm my senses and my soul needs somewhere to repair, a place that feels vaguely safe.
No more.
Until now, I have never understood how hoarders become hoarders, how so many barn finds end up drowning in stacks of old magazines, mouldy coats and holey underwear, shirts with frayed collars and moth-eaten blankets, abandoned broken toasters and old chairs missing a leg.
Why would the owner of, say, a fabulous old Ferrari, a Jaguar or a Bugatti start piling crap on top of it and eventually lose it completely amidst the offcuts of their life?
We have seen the barn-find film clips, the coffee table books. Indeed I myself have written about a few in these very pages over the years – I have unearthed not one but two Dino Ferrari’s in my time, multiple Jaguar E-Types of both six and 12 cylinders, a few BMW E9 coupes, a Goggomobil, an Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8, a brace of Citroens both DS and Tractions, and a 1920s AJS motorbike with sidecar!
I am not unfamiliar with the syndrome. Typically an elderly owner full of good intentions resorts in desperation to using the garage as a short-term storage option, circumnavigating the old car with suitcases, crates, bundles of newspaper and old bills, convinced it will only be for a few days, or weeks, or months …
In no time, life gets in the way, the entombed precious vehicle becomes enmeshed deeper and deeper into the mire. More junk piles on top. Then the owner’s health fades. What seemed like a quick exercise becomes a permanent state – until the Grim Reaper visits and the beneficiaries start squabbling with each other over grandpa’s silly old cars and all those useless bits of crap in the shed.
Is this what is happening to me? Am I destined to sit dribbling in a vinyl chair with daytime TV blaring on the other side of the nursing home lounge fantasising that any day now I will escape and fire up the relic and go for another country cruise as if it was still 1986?
I can barely turn around in the shed while eight boxes labelled ‘kitchen’ slide sideways and lean against three bags with a sticky label crying ‘Linen’. I tried to get to a cordless drill and inadvertently triggered a landslide of ‘Books, Front Room’ boxes crashing into a stack of carefully arranged ‘Laundry cupboard’ plastic tubs, which thankfully arrested the total collapse, domino like, that was ominously threatening to engulf the precious Citroen DS21.
The carcass and the floor of the 1926 B2 Caddy has become a convenient shelf, the bonnet a precarious ledge. So far, only the E-Type has remained sacred, unsullied and still capable of being taken for a drive … that is if time ever permits between visits from engineers, electricians telling us it is a much bigger job than they thought and, of course, plumbers’ apprentices with their pants halfway down to their knees.
Just going into the shed impacts on my mental health. The dust from the builders rampaging through the house is itself life threatening, but it is the self-inflicted misery that results from being unable to engage in my typical therapy of breaking things in the shed that undoubtedly is a far greater threat to my overall well-being.
To say nil about my dread that I am on the slippery slope to becoming one of those people who never unbundle the crap that was only ever going to clog up the shed for a little while … Barn find in the making?