I grew up in New England, and barely survived the winters. I moved south to GA immediately after school. The move a few years ago up to Knoxville was as far north as I was willing to go ever again. My pledge to never again own a snow shovel has been broken.
Hopefully our EE's will make it through the winter. I also left mine outside, as I ran out of garage space. The thorough garage cleaning never got done last year, so when frost came I crammed as many plants in as possible and promised to get to the cleaning "later". I've got 2 (definitely not hardy) red bananas in there, as well as a large Alocasia and some hanging baskets of ferns, along with a bunch of smaller stuff. Some things are in there to protect the pots more so than the plants that were in them.
I'm trying to do a little something every day to clear out the garage. The milk jug collection is now outside planted with winter sown seeds, and the hands tools are sharpened/oiled/organized. The hand tools were easy to work on because I could bring them in to the kitchen. I don't forsee bringing in all the long-handled shovels, rakes, etc., so those will have to get cleaned up on the driveway some nice sunny spring day.