Garage mess torments homeowners

Despite their ample bank accounts, well-heeled homeowners would appear to suffer the same kinds of domestic idiosyncrasies as the rest of us.

Take the humble garage, for example, the only piece of real estate on the American landscape that is capable of breeding inanimate objects when its owners aren’t looking.

Leave the car out for just a night, as we all learn the hard way, and by the next morning a random object or two will mysteriously have taken up residence in the space. Leave the car outside for another night or two, and the objects within will begin to multiply on their own so rapidly that, for all practical purposes, the garage will be well on its way to becoming lost forever.

It’s a common predicament, of course, one that afflicts homeowners of every socioeconomic class. Clutter happens, no matter if you’re rich or poor. Yet the moneyed types in suburban subdivisions across the country, unlike those of us of more modest means, are doing something about the mountains of stuff that have overwhelmed their three-car garages and effectively abandoned their small automotive fleets to the elements.

They’re reclaiming their garages again and alleviating their clutter-induced angst by hiring trained organizers to come in and do the work for them.

According to a story on the trend in The New York Times last week, owners of McMansions all over the country are happily shelling out $12,000 or more to get the junk out of their garages and their cars back inside. The National Association of Professional Organizers – yes, there is such an organization – estimates that there are now more than 500 organizing businesses that specialize in garage reclamation.

Americans last year spent $800 million on products and services aimed at reducing garage glut, making it one of the fastest growing segments of the home improvement market.

The designer garage, the story tells us, has now become the latest suburban status symbol.

Even if I could afford the $200 or so an hour it would take to hire a professional organizer, I would never even consider throwing my hard-earned money away on such an exercise in futility.

My experience with garages – I’ve owned two over 22 years – has taught me that a garage is a black hole in the domestic realm, a dark unstructured space where the physical laws that govern the rest of the universe simply do not apply. Except for the one, of course, that says nature abhors a vacuum.

My second garage – not in the designer league, but serviceable – began amassing objects almost immediately after it was built two years ago. One morning I walked inside to find that the two-car space had been magically reduced to one, displacing my wife’s car from that day on.

Since most of the clutter was entirely unfamiliar to me, I was left to conclude either that total strangers were depositing their castoffs in my garage while I slept, or that my wife was secretly hitting the yard sale circuit again. She feigned ignorance, of course, and hinted instead that life is full of impenetrable mysteries, and garages can often be the most impenetrable of all.

If I work at it, I might be able to salvage half of my two-car garage, which is better than no garage at all.