A Garage full of Memories

Mr Geniaus and I are bowerbirds, thankfully we have lots of storage at our house especially in the huge garage downstairs. Whenever the kids say they are throwing out a piece of furniture or disposing of some childhood treasures we offer to house them because "You never know when someone may need one".

Crunch time has come; we need to make space to store a houseful of furniture for one of the kids who is rebuilding and we are not going to add more storage space to our house.  So Mr Geniaus and I started a major cleanup (and throwout) in the garage.

And what did a find? - A Garage full of Memories. 

Holly Hobbie Fabric

My back is aching, my hair is full of dust, I am filthy and in need of a bath but I had a wonderful time clearing out and will continue to as I have more days of tidying ahead of me.

The Holly Hobbie material in my box of fabric reminded me of the doona cover and pillow cases I made for our younger daughter to match her Holly Hobbie wallpaper. She had a lovely little room at our house in Bronte. The scraps of rainbow wallpaper reminded me of the bedroom our boys had in our Maroubra house; the yellow chunky tube beds they had are resting on the other side of the garage.

Glittering in the bottom of a fabric box was a remnant from the purple sequined material out of which I made a formal dress for my elder daughter when she was at Uni. She had a very social time at University; I always seemed to be making formal dresses for hear to wear to balls and dinners.

Tucked away in a corner is the big posh metal English pram that I transported my first two children around in before I got a Mini Minor for a car. There was no way the pram that was nearly as big as the Mini would fit in the boot. Prior to getting the Mini I used to push that pram on a 5 mile round trip to have lunch with my Mum in her lunch hour.  Just along from that pram is my younger daughter's toy pram, I can offload that in a year or two when her daughters are big enough to push it.

Three young cousins

Still in boxes were some books belonging to my late father. As I offloaded these onto the bookshelves I found some other treasures in the box. There was a full copy of the Daily Telegraph from October 17, 1983. That is the issue that had a picture of the Geniaus offspring with Captain Mark Phillips, there was the order of service from a cousin's First Communion and a photo of some younger cousins playing dressups in their mother's wedding dress.

Trivial Pursuit, cricket bats, roller skates, an electric trainset and other toys from the seventies and eighties sparked further happy memories of a family growing up.

Do you have a garage full of memories?