The garage is made for cars again

It's that time of year when we once again run out of storage space in our homes.

That's because the approach of winter forces us to clean out our two-car garages so we can actually park our vehicles in them. That way they won't seem so much like mobile deep freezes when we climb in them on those cold, winter mornings.

Throughout much of the year, our family cars sit in the driveway. At our house, this allows us to have room to store all manner of important items including bicycles, boxes of dishes that were temporarily relocated to make room for interior renovations and a new china cabinet, and Girl Scout troop supplies.

The reason most of us have two-car garages is to provide us with enough storage space.

Then along comes winter and sadly we're forced to temporarily house the vehicles in the garage. It's probably the same feeling that ancient farmers experienced when they had to bed down with the livestock every winter.

When you lose your family room to the cattle and goats, you realize it's going to be a long winter.

Recently I spent the largest part of a weekend trying to take back the garage. It wasn't easy. It's amazing how much stuff ends up stockpiled in our garages over the course of seven months.

I truly admire folks who actually manage to get their cars into the garage year-round. Where do they store all those supplies of family life?

Garages are a thing of beauty when nothing is in them. But it doesn't take long to fill them up with extra refrigerators, freezers, paint cans, sleeping bags and assorted tools.

The first general merchandise store probably was in a garage.

In 1920, one magazine writer suggested people should keep their cars in the house.

House and Garden magazine in 1958 published a photo of the house-of-the-future with a "living garage." It showed a Chevy parked in a living room across from the divan.

Portland, Ore., has a law that requires that three-quarters of a home's facade must be for the living area and not the garage. Clearly, residents there don't realize just how important it is for American families to have large garages.

Then there's the case of Steve Jobs, who founded the Apple Computer Co. in 1977 in the family's garage. Without the family garage and Steve's father's willingness not to keep the family cars parked outside, we might never have seen this high-tech revolution.

When I was growing up in St. Louis County, my parents had a carport. We didn't have a garage to store stuff. We had to make do with a small attic, a backyard storage shed, large hall closets and a furnace room.

When Joni and I bought our first house, it had a one-car garage. When we bought our second house, we bought one with a two-car garage so we could both shelter our cars in winter.

But it didn't take long for us to realize that a two-car garage also meant more storage space.

At this point, I'm thinking our family needs a three-car garage so we can have more storage room.

Of course, the difficulty would come in winter. The bigger the garage, the harder it will be to reclaim it for the family cars every fall.

Still, I wouldn't turn down the extra storage.

You can always move the car. It's not as easy to move everything else.

Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.