Home improvement stuff

[fenchurch]

Yesterday, I was majorly productive... or, as we like to say, I committed a cleanness. We're actually pretty good at keeping the house clean and generally tidy, but there are always spaces where the stuff just seems to pile up. We've got the back of the Library with a few boxes and a lot of videotapes that need to be gone through. We've got the Junk Room Space Room that is a perpetual clutter battlefield (the problem is that we don't go in there regularly and we keep the door shut -- it's too easy to just stick stuff in there we don't want to deal with immediately). And then there's the garage. It's not horrible, but things do have a tendency to pile up... I can't even say stack, because we've been known to just open the garage door and chuck boxes out there when we're in a hurry.

Anyway, yesterday I tackled one section of the garage, the bit in the back with our food storage and our tools... and a bunch of loose packing peanuts that had escaped their garbage bag prison and boxes of random things that ended up stacked there for some reason, to the point where navigating in that area was getting tricky. I didn't take any "Before" pictures (due to extreme embarrassment that we'd let things get that bad in the first place) but when I was done, I was really wishing I had. I organized the tool area, emptied boxes (including a lidded bucket containing items I'm fairly sure were packed in there when we moved to this house almost nine years ago), organized the food storage, threw away a ton of stuff (and created a pile of stuff that needs to be taken to the dump as well as a pile of stuff that needs to be offered on Freecycle). And then I vacuumed (we have an area rug in that section). It looks wonderful out there now... and it also gives me a place where I can bring boxes from other parts of the garage in order to go through them.

Oh! And I got clever with another section of the garage... the previous owners had finished off a small room in the far corner of the garage to serve as an office, only they'd done it the way they did every other project they worked on: half-assed. To give you an idea of some of the stuff we found when we moved in, even though it would have been dead simple to just bring a new phone line in from the phone box mounted right outside the new office, they ran regular phone cord (like the sort that goes from the wall to your phone) under the carpet inside the house and out into the garage along the floor (held down with duct tape) and into the office... and then BACK into the house along the same route, so there could be a second phone connected up to that line. Yeah, we're not entirely sure how that was supposed to work, either.

At any rate, when they finished off this very nice little room, they didn't bother doing anything logical like mounting in a real light fixture or putting in anything useful like a light-switch. Instead, there's a cheap shoplight suspended on chains from the ceiling and you have to walk into the room, find the dangling power cord and plug it into an outlet on the wall. A bit tricky at night. To make matters worse, we recently rearranged our network setup so the garage office could be used as our server room (eventually, we're going to change over to being completely rackmounted, but for the time being we've got two desktop systems and one rackmount just sitting on the tabletop), so we go out there a whole lot more than we used to. I cleaned out the room a bit a few months ago... enough so that it's possible for more than one person to fit in there without tripping over anything (yes, we have waaaay too much crap stuff), but we've been trying to find some sort of immediate solution for the light problem (eventually, we'll be wiring in a real light fixture, but that's pretty low on the To Do list at the moment).

We tried to find some sort of remote switch... either wireless or with a cord that plugged straight into the wall then ran around to where we could easily reach it to flip the light on. No luck. Until Thursday night, while we were wandering around Home Depot (aka our second home) looking for things we'd need for our current projects and all the pieces clicked into place in my brain (it was a real V8 moment). The shoplight in there is just hanging on chains from some hooks. It has a cord that goes off one end, dangles down and gets plugged into the wall. We have an extension cord already running around the edge of the room, behind the storage shelves, from when we used to have a second fridge in the garage (there's only one outlet in the garage proper, with the way they finished off the office). So... yesterday I turned the shoplight around, then had rackham help me feed the power cord over and behind the storage shelves (sticking up some large cord organizers to hold it on the ceiling) and voila! It still has to be plugged in to turn it on, but now that can be done right at the doorway!! Yay!!!

Oh yeah, and we finally pulled off the door frame and remounted it the other direction so the door will open out instead of in (where there's not enough room for it to open all the way, due to storage shelving). We've only been talking about doing it for nine years... and, in the end, it took us about half an hour. Tops. But it's done!!! Even more yay!!