Empty (garage) nester

The National Association of Home Builders reports that 82 percent of homes have two-car garages, but only 15 percent of people park their cars in them.

Yesterday morning I was irritated that I wasn’t one of those 15 percent. I meant to be. I had replaced the 1960s wooden garage door with synthetic wood that I could raise and lower smoothly with a remote. It took Herculean effort to raise the old one, especially when you had to do it from a squatting position. You squatted to avoid being struck in the head by the top door panel that sometimes fell off its rollers. That usually required a visit to the emergency room.

The noise differential between the two doors is off the chart, too. Opening and closing the old doors had those upstairs watching TV scrambling for the remote to turn the volume up. Instead of parking the car in the hard-to-get-into-and-out of place, we filled it with “stuff.” Eighty-five percent of garage owners don’t think this is odd.

I saw some of those folks on U.S. 460 Sunday morning. Their vehicles looked like mine: moving igloos. You could catch a glimpse of the drivers through the peephole they had cleared on the windshield. Wipers were useless. Unprotected from single-digit temperatures, they were petrified wood, so hard they couldn’t grab traction on the glass as they swept uselessly across it. It was so cold that the windshield washer fluid froze on the windows, giving them that frosted shower door look.

I could have avoided the frozen-car-driving challenge if I had cleaned out a space in the garage for the car.

My reason for not doing so is becoming archaic. The cluttered garage, a monument to consumerism, is going the way of the dinosaur. Already some of my neighbors have up-to-date ones.

Arnold, who lives across the street, built a two-car garage which he attached to his house with a breezeway. Its interior looks like a distant cousin of my garage. Arnold paneled his, put in gas logs, and tiled the floor, which really is clean enough to eat off of.

What does he use his garage for? With a friend’s help, he’s restoring an antique Chevelle. Every weekday evening for months the two of them have been sanding, painting, and polishing every inch of that car.

Another neighbor has four garages -- for his motorcycles and tools. His truck sits in the driveway, as do the cars of the people who live beside him. Their garage is so orderly that they leave the door open all day and sit in its entrance on summer evenings. With no front porch, the garage is the best place to watch the world go by.

You can’t do this from the patio. They have already been transformed into havens of comfort with heaters, pools, fountains, lighting and high-end furniture. With that finished, homeowners have had to find something else to renovate. There’s not much left, except for the “last great place” -- the garage.

Many new homes feature the garage on the front of the house. People build lofts in them, put in heating and air conditioning, and partition the space into gardening and woodworking sections. Some put their computers there and work from home. Stuff like paint tins, tools, and camping equipment is hidden behind sleek storage units.

Garages have not always been attached to the house. This practice began in the 1920s with a single-car space and expanded to the two-car version in the 1930s. Their use didn’t change much until the 1960s when homeowners turned them into dens and fourth bedrooms, giving up the garage. Today, turning garages into extra living space is like filling them with clutter -- it’s so yesterday.