Tools, Where They Actually Belong

When I woke up this morning I had a garage that had one operable garage door, one inoperable garage door, and one missing garage door. Which has been, you know, super useful.

Right at this very moment I have a garage with three operable garage doors, one of which actually opens with the push of a button. Can you believe this shit? I push a button, the door opens. No heaving it up over my head by hand, no pinched fingers, no awkward jumping and hanging from the damn thing to pull it shut again. It’s like magic. Or like actually being in the twenty-first century, just like everybody else.

And this?

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This means I can finally do something about this…

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This small sampling of my life includes:

  1. Stuff I dumped out of a 5 gallon bucket in a panic when I was rushing to put out slightly-larger-than-intended bonfire
  2. Snowboots. That have probably been sitting there since the last time it snowed.
  3. An extraordinary amount of paint and drywall related paraphernalia
  4. Oil painting supplies, stained glass supplies, tiling supplies, glass flameworking supplies, and an empty bin (aka stuff I did before I became addicted to tearing apart houses)
  5. Tools that should legitimately be in the house
  6. Tools that should not be in the house, including one extra-large miter saw, one extra-small tile saw, a set of dovetail jigs, bolt cutters, and a sawsall
  7. Tools that need to be cleaned
  8. Stuff from Lowe’s I gave up trying to put away and just dropped on the middle of the floor.

It’s shocking, shocking that my life feels just a little disorganized at the moment, so I jumped at the chance to finally move some of my tools to their future home. Well, first I redistributed some of the junk that is taking up space where an actual car might get parked, eventually.

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Uh, don’t mind the extremely rigged up garage door motor at the moment, I need to do a little electrical work to get a plug in the right spot for it.

Then I decided to be a lazy-ass and take full advantage of being out in the country where it is perfectly acceptable to park on your lawn, directly in front of the door, so that you don’t have to carry a bunch of tools eighty extra steps to the garage.

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So, now the future workshop has actual tools in it, it just doesn’t have actual lights…

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To say that the shop “needs some work” is an understatement of epic effing proportions. To start, I need to pull down the cabinets and rotted out wood on the walls…

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Rewire, insulate, drywall, paint those metal cabinets a vintage turquoise and rehang them, and then get the bigass furnace out there hooked up.

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And all of that is going to happen sometime next year because I have way too many things going on inside the house right now. But the good news about tools is that you can make a mess with them anywhere, so I’m sure the shop in its current state (plus a crap-load of extension cords and plug-in lights) will be getting a lot of use between now and “finished.”

I am so lucky, so freaking lucky to have this space, I can’t even tell you. There are like three dead birds under that orange chair, and one of the cabinets on the wall is inexplicably hung upside down, and it smells like a colony of racoons has been using it as an outhouse for the last year (likely), but I don’t even care, because you know what? Bird shit or no bird shit, I am going to do really awesome things in this space.

And now I can walk to my back door without tripping over a drywall pan. Score.

10 Responses

  1. Its neat to hear you (used to) do flameworking too. Do you think you’ll set up a space for that in one of your outbuildings someday?

  2. Kit,

    Thanks for a great blog. How did you do the picture of the mud room with the hand drawn arrows? I love the way you take pictures of a room and then draw in the remodeling plans.

    1. Hey Brian – I used to (or usually do) use Photoshop for that kind of thing, but it always takes longer than you think it should. This time I took a picture of the room with my iPad and drew right on it in a note-taking app which was quick, but looks a little funky. I’m always just trying new things with it.

  3. There’s a Pella window in my kitchen that was installed upside down. At least, I assume that’s what happened, since the handle that opens it is a few inches from the top, a stretch even for a tall person.

  4. OMG This place just keeps getting bigger and better! When do the donkeys come home? Any other new critters lately?

  5. Turquoise cabinets? Sign me up! I’m so happy you are getting to reclaim your house space. The “to-do” list never gets any shorter though, does it?

  6. Woohoo! A bonafide workspace! I really like the idea of turquoise cabinets and a working furnace, too. Heck, I’d be happy for half as big and unheated! As an aside, did you ever find the 6″ stem for that light?

  7. Awesome workshop! Everyone who loves to tinker deserves a space like this. Apparently, you have DIYer raccoons if they like to hang there as well.

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