Prepare the Tools

     Greetings fellow adventurers. If you've been here for the start of this chaotic and dusty journey, welcome back. If you're just tuning in, let me catch you up. Back in January, I explained in my post New Year, New Journey that I'm making this year my Organization year. The goal is to get rid of things that I don't need, reorganize my supplies and products, clean, and just overall reclaim my life from the debris that piled up in the past year. The goal is with the cleaning and reorganizing, I'll be able to be more productive in my work and that the trend of reclaiming my life will continue on to other parts of the house and just my life as a whole. So far, those who have been following along, have been giving me a lot of positive feed back so I thank you.

When in doubt, build it

     Besides the plethora of cleaning that I've been doing and the sorting of the piles I have at the moment, I have a few other things going on. As I mentioned previously, I have already been able to tackle the reorganization and dusting of the 3 book cases that I have the majority of my research and reference books for my work housed. This mini library is filled with random information stretching through across subjects of art, history, theology, botany, weapons and vehicles. You never know what you might need for a project and I enjoy the subjects that I've collected material on. I've also mentioned in my post Where do I put this? that I have acquired several different storage units for my supplies and products. So what's next?

     If you have a small work space like I do or a space with strange angles, you may have the same issue that I've come across which is there's just not a particular item the right size you can readily purchase to fit with what you need. Well if you're a maker or have maker friends/family, you're going to have to make it yourself. My wonderful father is helping me with perhaps the most ambitious part of this project. A sort of shelving unit which will house both 

Base of shelving unit

my scanner and printer. With some careful measuring taken of the size of the pieces of equipment along with my filing cabinets on which the entire unit will be on top of, off to the garage he went. One of the good things about living in a household of makers is that we tend to have the materials we need on hand in some form or another for various projects. Using some scrap wood we had in our recycled wood pile, he was able to make the initial base over a couple of days of gluing, cutting, sanding and putting a couple of coats of polyurethane to protect it. Shifting my filing cabinets over a few inches, we plopped the base on top and made sure that that everything was level before we temporarily put my printer back into position. Next step we get to problem solve is the shelf which be put above. The entire assembly needs to be strong enough for both pieces of equipment but sturdy enough to handle the slight wobble a printer or scanner does when in use. The last thing that I need to worry about is the assembly collapsing and two rather expensive pieces of equipment ending up damaged.

     So making little steps of progress in the overall scheme of things while figuring out. A few

Slow progress of space

ideas which I initially had at the beginning had to be set aside once I began this journey mostly because of impracticality of them along with discovering that there were better solutions. Of course those bits can be discussed at another time.