Garage Good!

Have you seen the story about the garage in Manhattan that’s on sale for $1,000,000?

I’m not talking about the kind of garage you park in to go to a show, where they inspect your car for dents and then go screeching off into the one of Dante’s nine circles of parking hell,* and then make you wait an hour after the show even though you know you turned your ticket in before the owner of that Mercedes they just brought up.

No, I’m talking about the kind of garage that’s attached to a house, except that the house in this case is an apartment building on East 11th Street. The garage is only 12 feet x 23 feet, so it’s definitely a one-car garage, except that it’s high enough so you can install one of those car elevators** like they have at outdoor parking lots so that, even if you are the only one retrieving a car at any given time, it still takes an hour because they have to move 47 other vehicles before they can get to yours, even though you told them you’d only be 10 minutes.

Anyway, if a little thing like that is going for a cool million, can you imagine what our humongous two-car garage in Stamford is worth? 

Not only can both garage doors be opened by remote control, they can also both be opened by punching in a super-secret code on a keypad. True, our security is somewhat compromised by the fact that both keypads have the same code, but there’s a strict limit to how many codes we can remember at our age.

Once inside, two cars fit comfortably, with plenty of space for people to get in and out, unlike the one-car garage we used to have in our Westchester condo townhouse, where passengers had to get out before you pulled in because there wasn’t enough room for the doors on the right side of the car to open.

Our Stamford garage also has lots of room for other stuff, such as:

• Two garbage bins.
• One recycling bin.
• Another garbage bin that holds rakes and brooms and such.
• A gargantuan bucket-type thing that my wife keeps gardening tools in.
• An old, full-size Grand Union shopping cart that our daughter somehow acquired for a movie she was shooting and that we actually moved with.
• Three semi-stable, free-standing metal shelving units.
• A box of left-over vinyl siding.
• Two stacks of snow tires.
• About a dozen outdoor patio chair cushions that we only take out when lots of people are coming over and which we’ve taken out exactly twice since we moved in.
• A stack of stackable chairs (see above).
• Some old lounge chairs that we’ve replaced but did not discard in case even more  people ever come over, like for the Maroon 5 concert we’re going to have on our patio because my wife thinks Adam Levine is hot.
• Several huge bags of mulch or soil or some gardening-type stuff like that.
• Two big pails of bird food.
• Two ladders, one of which is a major, Transformers-style ladder I got my wife for Christmas (and yet, I am still alive).
• A huge defective water ballast for a cantilevered patio umbrella that we returned and they told us to just throw away the ballast thing but I haven’t because I’m waiting to make sure my account was properly credited.

And much more stuff that I can’t remember and am too lazy to go down and catalog.

Believe it or not, there’s still more room in our garage, but we’ve only been here a year, so give us some time.

Or give us $2,000,000 and it’s yours. What the hell…I’ll even throw in the house.

*It’s likely that Dante did not own a car, but I enjoy putting a classical reference into these posts occasionally so you think I’m cultured. **Available at additional charge.

For more on our adventures as first-time homeowners at age 57, and moving to Stamford, visit http://theupsizers.wordpress.com/