Sprink Breag

Week Two of Sprink Breag. Wait, that should say Spring Break. Anyway, you know what I mean. It's where we forget how to spell or get up on time. Thyme? Clox? Wut?

Kara has made herself useful as a babysitting helper for one of my friends.

Our neighbors are out manicuring the yard while we're still waiting on bits of ours to drain. I wasn't trained as a civil engineer, but my head is swirling with different ideas to improve drainage on our land. Nothing that a big pile of money, or a big pile of work, won't fix--as with most house and property problems.

One big pile of work was our garage, is our garage. While we still have a long list of improvements for it, one improvement came about last Sunday.

I make a Goodwill/give-away pile throughout the winter in the garage. It gets quite large. Better women than I turn it into a garage sale; I can't handle that. So Kris loaded up all this Goodwill garbage and took it to town.

While he was gone, I decided I just wanted ONE clean corner of the garage where we could put bikes. That meant... well, I didn't quite know what to do so I just dug into it.

One item we couldn't take anywhere was a perfectly good box spring, because, naturally, used bed-anything is rather gross. We couldn't really burn it because a good deal of it was metal.

Ahh! I could take it apart and put the metal in the alley store! The alley store is where you set out anything you want to be free of at the alley. The alley pickers are always combing the alleys, and usually in a 1/2 hour, the item is gone.

Now that we don't live in town, I had permission from a friend to use her alley store for the scrap metal.

What a nice surprise when I pulled off all the fabric from the box spring: the wooden part was just about exactly what I needed for a bike rack! The only modification was moving a center crosspiece up to make way for bike tires. A bike rack had been yet another project in the long list of projects either to buy or make.

And that corner I was cleaning out was perfect for bikes.

So on to a cleaning spree. It really only involved sweeping and my outstanding skill in stacking and packing to put the garage in order.

One clean corner begets another. I put the entire garage to rights except the workbench (that's Kris's job unless I just have enough of it one day) and the scary corner with the old cabinet in it.

For the first time since we've lived here, we don't have to be shame-faced about opening the garage in broad daylight. The bikes have a home instead of just landing wherever the last rider stops riding.

And our shins get a blessed break from the usual bashing into foreign objects.

Here's my off-the-wall repurposing of that box spring into a bike rack using concrete blocks on the ends to hold it up. Yeah, not fancy, I know, but it was on hand, and I just wanted a usable bike rack immediately.

So our break hasn't been a glamorous trip to a sunny beach. It's been a wet yard and repurposing a piece of trash; studying and sweeping out the gallons of mud and dirt that walk in every day on our floors. Maybe I can just pretend the dirt is sand from the beach.

Nah, it's fine. I'm here in Indiana and choosing to enjoy each day of Sprink Breag.