Cleaning the Shed

This post is the follow-up to my previous post, Rolling Dips. If you haven’t read Rolling Dips yet, read that before you read this.

I fulfilled my resolve to clean the tool shed about three weeks ago. Two aspects of it are worth sharing here.

The first was the groundedness of the resolve. The resolve was to clean the tool shed with the same quality that those men engineered that forest road. So the emphasis was on quality, not time. I felt no sense of hurry. What I felt instead was a calling to do some work on it every day. Some days I would spend three hours. A couple of days with previous commitments, I put in only several minutes of token work. I didn’t care how long it took as long as every day I spent time cleaning the tool shed.

My resolve was not to “tidy it up.” My resolve was to reconstruct the shed with quality. So I was thinking about its structure all the time, often for days before deciding what to do. An example was two organizers that I had inherited from Alysia’s step-dad, a general contractor. Different hardware was sorted compactly into fifty plastic boxes within the metal organizers. Those two organizers sat on a shelf that had bowed under their thirty year-long weight. Most of the plastic boxes were filled with hardware I had never used, partly because the only way to see what was inside was to pull each box out. As a result, I knew approximately where the 2 or 3 boxes that I used the most often were but everything else was a blur.

So I took all the boxes out and put them on the work bench. I went through several re-arrangements in my cleaning until I came to one that felt right.

The content of many of the boxes I threw away; I would never use them. The remaining boxes I laid along three vertically-short shelves. With nothing above them, I could easily see what was in each box. I got rid of one of the organizers’ metal container. The other I screwed to the wall. In it I put the might-use plastic boxes. The organizer was only half full which allowed me to be able to see down into each box without needing to pull it out.

That wall-mounted organizer allowed me to reduce the plastic boxes on the three shelves down to two shelves and the much more spacious wooden shelf that had been bowing under the concentrated weight of those organizers was now free to hold other spacious things. That was the level of detail with which I “cleaned the tool shed.”

The second aspect of this project I wanted to share was the effect it had on my daily interactions with maintenance. So many times, I have seen something that needs to be fixed or can be done better and I know right where the hardware is to do it. Within a minute I have what I need and a few minutes later, it’s fixed. Formerly, the clutter would have created a time-eating thicket that I rarely attempted to pass through. Things didn’t get done.

Plus things get done better. This is partly due to having gone through everything, I knew where the weird things were and I would suddenly realize that a particular weird thing will allow me to fix this thing better than if I used only conventional things. Things also get done better because the organization allows me to quickly gather and thereby move to a deeper understanding of the issue and my developing solution. This usually leads to second thoughts and modifications. Plus wanting to solve this issue with a two-hundred year forest road quality solution brings better thoughts to the assembly of easily-assembled tools and hardware.

I enjoyed this work. Not having a time limit, but having a commitment to spend some time on it every day, led me to sometimes spend hours creating some small thing. Like I wanted paper handy to write down lists or measurements. They had lain in the general clutter. But I wanted the paper (with a nearby pencil) to be in some specified place that did not take up space in the work area. Eventually I mounted a clip to unused wall space at handwriting level. Small things accumulating into a place that both helps me and holds me to higher standards.