People looking to buy homes in the Highlands area often get stuck on the closet issue, or to be specific, the serious shortage of such. None of the century old homes here were built anticipating the space required for a washer and dryer, which is why you can drive down our alleys and see lots of houses with a bump out in back, almost always made of material inferior to the original structure.

Similarly, our predecessors must not have kept all their bridesmaids dresses or had puffy Patagonia parkas or specialized helmets for each and every activity because clearly, few of our homes in Highlands have room for the amount of crap we keep. We take trips to Ikea for the fantasy of seeing what a designer thinks can happen in an 800 sq. ft. space knowing full well we could never pull it off. We have as much junk stuffed in a chest of drawers as fills their entire, smart, designer space.

As we planned our move into North High for March 4, we thought we had the Highland’s dream: storage! The staff and administration at the school had offered us various closets and two entire rooms backstage for our storage so we wouldn’t have to schlep everything in and out of the school each Sunday. This past Sunday we announced that on Monday, Jan. 31 all that changed when we got a note from a supervisor at DPS forbidding us to store anything on site. For 4 months we’ve planned with the assumption of storage and now we had 4 weeks to figure out how to be portable. We were outed from the closet.

Thankfully our current landlord was kind enough to extend our stay through the end of April, with the possibility of a month to month after that, until the new development work begins. This extra time allows us to make an earnest search for other possibilities with STORAGE but it also gives us time to create the systems we need to be portable if we need to temporarily gather at North High.

So put on your specialty helmet for pioneering ‘cause here we go!

Mark