Last weekend, my dad, Nikhil, Shaan, and I spent a few hours starting to clean our garage at our home in Pleasanton, which was desperately overdue for a spring cleaning. We use our garage as a part storage unit, part entertainment center, part home for our cars — so in a nutshell, there’s a lot going on there.

While we were cleaning, I saw several things that made me think about my mom. Everywhere I go around our house, I see her creative, loving touch, and even a room as seemingly uninteresting as the garage is no exception. Today, I want to share a few of the things I noticed.

One was a table that my mom had put together by stacking two car tires, placing a thin panel of wood on top, and covering the whole thing with a sheet. My guess? We had some tires and wood panels sitting around, taking up space and offering no value. To someone like me, they would’ve looked like garbage. But not to her — she saw an opportunity to turn otherwise useless items into something very practical. I would expect nothing less.

I should clarify that my mom’s taste has always been pretty solid, albeit a bit eccentric at times. This tire table probably fell into the latter category. And yet, the table didn’t look half bad once she put a sheet on top of it. She did maintain standards for our house, after all.

Then there’s the tapestry she hung in front of our water heater tank and air conditioning/heating unit — in other words, both bulky, unattractive items. Which is why they belong in a garage. But my mom saw an opportunity to spruce up this area. She took a spare tapestry that was sitting around, stuck up some hooks, and hung the tapestry in front of the tank and AC unit. And what had previously looked quite blah now looked that much brighter.

What’s significant about the table made of tires and the tapestry is that they exemplify my mom’s ability to see beyond what’s just there in front of her. It’s really remarkable.

Moving on — during our clean, I also noticed all the outdoor Christmas lights and decor that my mom bought, like our light-up life-size reindeer and our nativity scene. Each year, as Christmas approached, our family (except my dad, who was probably “napping” to get out of it, ha!) put up our lights together in our front yard. We’d grab our ladder and strings lights across the trees, bushes, and grass. It was always a toss-up as to whether the lights would actually go on when we finally plugged them in — but what a victory it felt like when they did.

Compared to the other houses in our neighborhood, most of which had an immaculate lighting job done by professionals, I always felt our house’s lights had so much character. I remember my mom asking one year whether we should get our lights professionally done, and I responded with a resounding, “No way!”

In addition to the Christmas lights, I couldn’t help but appreciate the cabinets that my mom had installed into our garage many years ago. Recognizing that our garage had become our de-facto storage unit and needed some organization, she worked with a contractor to get several cabinets built so we could stop the clutter.

She built one shoe cabinet, which is now home to hundreds of pairs of shoes, and then several others which now store everything under the sun — seasonal decor, spare electronics, paper plates and other picnicky stuff, you name it.

Anyone who saw our garage for the first time would just think that these cabinets were built into the garage from its initial design, because that’s how well they fit in — but nope, this was all my mom.

Finally, though we gave it away a long time ago, being in the garage reminded me of the Barbie car that Sanam and I used to love. As in, one of those tiny powered vehicles that 5-year-olds can drive around and have a blast in. Sanam and I loved our pink car, which we drove around all the time in Connecticut. Then, when we moved to California, Nikhil was about the right age to use it. Of course, he wouldn’t touch a pink car. So, my mom spray painted it green. That’s right — she transformed the Barbie car into a G.I. Joe one which got Nikhil’s stamp of approval. We kept this car in the garage until Nikhil outgrew it and my mom gifted it to a family friend.

There’s a lot more that I can write about, but I’ll stop there — you get the gist of it. My final remark is that it took four of us about four hours to clean all the dust, declutter, and rearrange the garage (and we only got about halfway through) — and yet, throughout all the years that my mom oversaw it, the garage never got half as bad. Without me even realizing, she was always keeping it — and the rest of our house — organized and clean. It would’ve taken so much time and work, but she always did it and never asked for credit.

One of the many blessings of having a mom like mine is getting to see her hand in so many things around me — even something as mundane as a garage. If you look, there’s actually a lot of beauty there.