1325 What's in your garage?

Does your garage look like this one in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan? Architectural Digest is going to feature it in a fall issue.

Our garage is pretty neat and clean (thanks to hubby), but he only cleans it spring and fall. It is probably holding more "left-overs-and-will-never-use-again" items than necessary. During the winter it holds the deck furniture, which makes it a bit tight for a van and SUV. The former kitchen seems to be in the garage. The last owner in the late 1990s replaced the cabinets with a light white washed birch look and installed the old base and wall cabinets (I think they started out as dark walnut but had been painted several times) across the front of the garage. Last year I replaced the refrigerator and the old side-by-side awaits it fate in the garage, usually holding only a sack of apples or 2 or 3 cans of pop. Holding up its end for history and tradition is a rolling 3 tray metal unit from our first apartment's kitchen. In glorious ovacado green is our plastic kitchen wastebasket from the 1970s which holds a variety of tools too shy to stand alone.

We have enough old unusable rags and too short pieces of lumber stashed around to start a small cottage industry. Until the last spring cleaning, we had probably 5-10 large cardboard boxes sitting atop the cabinets--just in case we ever needed to repack a computer or DVD player or mail something really large. Hanging on to boxes until they get buggy seems to be a problem with us. Does anyone else do that?

We have several neighbors who can barely get one car in their two car garage because of the boxes and tools and "stuff" stacked to the ceiling. They seem to put a lot out on trash day, but the pile in the garage never goes down. I suspect this is a type of respectable, but almost out of control, hoarding.

This person responded at a hoarding OCD board (?) with an answer I thought showed a lot of insight: "I hoard because I hoard. It's a cycle where my home is a complete, unfunctional mess, so I believe that I will use all these items once I clean (or in order to clean) up the rest of the mess. I have known about my hoarding/OCD for a few years and have gone through much BT and it seems to have only gotten worse. I think it's because I truly believe that once I organize my house, I will finally be able to use all the items that have been 'hidden' or in piles or behind other things. So, I have blind faith that I will soon clean up, and that perpetuates the comforting and incorrect belief of future use."

It's exactly the reason we have problems throwing away empty boxes and a frig that we don't really need. Blind faith that we might use them some day. On a continuum, I'm just a hoarder-in-waiting compared to my messy neighbors.