This Old House

We have lived in this house for six and a half years. Well, more or less. We did take a leave of absence for a year and a half, so I guess that means we’ve only physically lived here for five years.

In any case, John decided he would clean out and organize the garage this weekend for the first time…ever.

(Meanwhile, I was in the house thoroughly scrubbing down the kitchen counters with a bit of Borax in an attempt to ward off cockroaches.)

After only a short time, I decided we should take some pictures of the garage cleaning and here’s what I saw:


Unfortunately I did not get a before picture of the closet in the garage. That’s what John decided to tackle first. Later this month I will post before and after pictures as part of Boo Mama’s Before and After. And, yes. I know cleaning the garage wasn’t on my to-do list, and technically my husband is the one cleaning it, but I think his efforts should be documented for the entire internet to see.

What I really want to relate today is the interesting finds we discovered in our garage. The one we’ve had for six and a half years.

First, there is the bag of doorknobs.

I think we knew about the plethora of random, mostly used, doorknobs, but we never actually pulled them all out of the garage closet. In fact, I’m pretty sure we initially glanced at the doorknobs, thought, “Do we need to replace any of the old doorknobs in our house with even older, dirtier doorknobs?” and decided, “Nope. Not today.” Then we pushed the doorknobs and the bag containing them to the far back corner of a shelf in the garage closet.

It turns out the bag in which the doorknobs have been housed is this:

Now, John has long told me tales of grocery shopping as a boy with his mom at the Skaggs Alpha Beta. I, in turn, have always laughed and told him what a ridiculous name for a grocery store, or really any store, this name is. Skaggs Alpha Beta? What is that? Does it mean something? Who would even dream up a name like this?

(John also insists that shopping carts are “buggies” while clearly I prefer the term “shopping cart”, or just "cart". That’s an entirely different issue, though it always seems to come up with the Skaggs Alpha Beta topic.)

Obviously I did not grow up in or near the Dallas area. To be fair, I suppose Piggly Wiggly is a strange name for a grocery store as well. But really, hasn’t everyone heard of Piggly Wiggly? Who’s heard of Skaggs Alpha Beta?

So, now I have proof in the form of a 20 year-old plastic shopping bag that Skaggs Alpha Beta was indeed a grocery store. And, judging by the picture, a pharmacy as well. (Yes, it has to be at least 20 years old because I believe Skaggs Alpha Beta was bought by some other company in 1988. My husband corroborates this information.)

The other odd discovery was the “secret shelf” in the garage closet. All the shelves (that we have seen and used) are metal. At the very top of the closet, noticeable only when you tilt the top metal shelf up or down, is a wooden board shelf. This shelf is about 12 feet high. It is waaaaaay up in the closet which apparently goes clear up to almost the roof of the house. In fact, this is the only picture I could get of this anomaly:

I know. It’s not very instructional. It was quite difficult to take a picture of something that high up in the closet.

Beyond discovering the “secret shelf”, we were even more perplexed by what we found residing on the “secret shelf”:

Uh-huh.

These shutters/blinds are stained the same color as the wood paneling we took down in our family room. However, we have no windows or opening in our entire house that are the correct size to fit these shutters. We are clueless as to what these would have ever been used for.

I probably don’t even need to say it, but these things are ugly. Granted, the fabric is faded and the shutters are tremendously dirty and dusty, but even cleaned up they would be ugly. I’m assuming the previous owners of the house thought so too, because they relegated them to the “secret shelf” – maybe about the same time as the doorknobs in the Skaggs Alpha Beta bag. Or, considering how old this house is, they could have been on that shelf for 40 years or more.

This makes us wonder what other secrets lurk in closets we’ve never taken the time to thoroughly examine or the attic, where we definitely don’t spend more than five minutes at a time.

John had to abandon the garage clean-up to attend a cousin’s birthday party, so he will finish at a later date. (And now that I’ve posted this on the blog, you can all hold him accountable!) I will keep you updated on what other goodies from bygone eras our garage holds in store.