Cleanin' the pipes

[tugrik]

For most of my life, the garage was the proverbial end-of-the-line for junk. Whenever Mom and Dad had something they didn't want to throw away but really couldn't do anything with, it ended up in a nice little cardboard box (labelled, sometimes), and it'd get passed down the pipeline. First, to the side of the room it was in, or the room's closet. Then, to make way for closetspace, down the hall. From there it'd migrate to the basement if we had one. If the basement was full, unfit for storage, or we were in one of the houses that didn't have one... the poor boxed item(s) would end up in the garage; their final resting place.

Eventually our garages filled up with ever more junk, as even during our poor times, we were ever the standardbred Americanos who spend their lives acquiring Stuff(tm) and then struggling to afford places to put it.

The problem that occurs here is that the garage can only hold so much. When the garage hits capacity, the pipeline of "stuff flow" starts to back up. A nice clean house becomes cluttered, boxes and bits starting to fill closets, and finally stack openly in bedrooms and hallways. In extreme cases (usually in fannish or fratboy-ish houses), you get to a state whre you have to bend, twist, and step just right to make it from the bedroom to the bathroom in the morning. I won't go into the even worse biological hazards that I've seen at some houses I've visted. *shudder*.

So, at least for my own mindset on the matter, the only way to truely clean and declutter the house starts with clearning the pipes. Empty out the garage, start shuffling stuff out to it, and empty it out s'more. Continue until happier. As a result, if I can get only one major room clean during a major MUST CLEAN NOW event, it's the garage. It is now 4:45am PDT, and we've manged to do just that.

The huge pile of dead batteries is gone, happily turned in for recycling at the local auto parts store. The look on their face as we unloaded enough to partially crush a standing cart was just priceless. The paint cans are all assembled together in a safe, nice-looking rack, waiting for the first BOP (battery/oil/paint day) at the local landfill, which occurs only once a month. At the left wall stands the core of the 'workshop' in progress. From garage door to housedoor lies the roll-away battery charger, shop vac, new tower-o-tools box, metal-topped workbench, wooden-topped rollycart (new item added today), bolted-to-the-slab 42U cabinet that houses our little webhosting project, the cold-soda machine (rescued from a closing dotcom) and the chest freezer. An 18-outlet strip runs the length of the wall below a 14'-long pegboard (which was already there), providing a perfect set of power outlets for the tool/work-area. On said pegboard are a few dozen tilt-bin organizers, full of newly sorted groups of screws, bolts, nuts, wiretaps, and assorted fiddlybits that used to live in piles and bags strewn about. Above both the workbench and the toolchest are two new flourescent shop-lights, newly installed. The back wall has the heater and laundry devices as always.

The right side, house to street, has the rack of solar-panel batteries (about 640ah worth), shelves full of Chaos toys we're gonig to give away (kinetic marble sculpture thingys), a really nice metal rack that holds motorcycle parts, helmets, gloves, the DeWalt cordless tools, motorcycle jackets on hooks, and all the soon-to-be-gone paint on the lowest level. The rest of that wall is wondrously clean of filth and clutter. I will probably put a 60gal airtank/compressor with a wall-mounted airhose there, as well as brackets to hang up the motorcycle jack. Overhead are nicely installed reel-ups, one with a powercord, one with a flourescent shoplight. They can both reach anywhere within the garage and halfway down the open driveway if needed. On the last little bit of wall inside the main garage door hangs a new paper-towel holder (with Brawny tear-off shop towels), a rag-bin with a fresh pack of shoprags, a wall-mounted ground-fault power strip, and 30' of high-gauge extention cord on a wall-mounted hanger, perfect for reeling out into the driveway to plug into the battery-tender on the van (to help it survive months of disuse without the battery dying).

The center of the garage is 100% free and clear, and three bikes now fit there in perfect harmony: My GS and 'Wing are in line, pulled in one after the other, leaving ample room to comfortably get on and off them. Whichever bike happens to be farther in (currently the GS) has the battery tender cable dropping down from the ceiling to keep the bike battery charged. The remaining space could fit my roomate's New Beetle easily. That's now 'the shop', though, and currently dead-center in it is reality_fox's first bike, his long-neglected Kawasaki 250 Ninja. It's to be the first bike torn apart and fixed in our little cycle-shop. Once fully running it'll get put up on EBay for sale, or maybe super-good-price it to one of my roomates that seriously could use it. Either way, it's going away once fixed. :) The remaining space up by the house-entry door has a nice and tough shop-carpet which is amusingly done up in zebra-stripes. An officechair sits in front of the Rack with its nicely mounted monitor (with KVM switch), a shop chair sits at the workbench, and a spare rollychair fits well in the corner in case more than one person needs to wheel around on their backside while working on things.

In the upstairs storage nook are four boxes belonging to my roomie Garth... pared down from 16 or so previously. Alongside them are a few truckboxes full of Burning Man gear, which will get sorted through at some later date (and I'd sorted them before, so they're pretty slimmed down already). Also up there are two boxes containing the parts for a newly purchased garage-attic fan, awaiting install by my housing-builder neighbor, the job now having the landlord's blessing. The ladder and three mountainbikes hang from the ceiling on earthquake-safe level hooks designed for the job. The garage door opener's light is even fixed, a job I'd been meaning to do for months now. As a finishing touch, I even put a small trash-can aside the workbench.

I can now go sit in my garage, and feel calm, and relieved. Clean, organized. I think it's safe to stop obessing now. F34r mY l33t w3Rk540P sK1llz.

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Now it's time to do the REST of the house. I've got all weekend to do it, with no other plans and no other excuses. The Kitchen will be first, dishes/stove and then Clutter-be-gone the counters. Then the livingroom/family room, and finally the most dreaded task of all: my own bedroom. The backyard is already done as a side product of garage work (they're somehow strangely related, you see). The dumpster leaves Saturday night, and then I can pull my van back into the driveway to hook up to the battery charger and then go about cleaning it; a quick, final task to end this post-spring cleaning madness.

Monday morning at work, I pick up the phone and dial MollyMaids back up. I tell them I'm ready for service to start, and would they please show up Tuesday for their first-pass/inspection. I meet them Tuesday at lunch (or after work), set them on their merry way scrubbing bathrooms, floors, and all the other bits none of us roomies ever want to do, and head off to see the parents up in Oregon. If all goes according to plan, I get home on Sunday to a clean, sane, bearable house... and it'll stay that way, with only maintenance-level effort.

Thanks for putting up with my rantings and obsessings while dealing with this long overdue life-fix-up. Expect the next livejournal entry to most likely be related to the motorcycle trip up to the parents, or maybe a coredump of some of the very interesting dreams I've been having during the 3-4 hours of sleep a night I've been getting between the work freakouts and Big Cleaning Event. I'm really looking forwards to the trip to the AMA races at Laguna Seca on the weekend of the 14th. It'll also be Bastille day, for those of you who know what that means. I'm going to have to think up something to do.

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PS: Paka/Perlandia: It was very nice seeing you two at the theater for the silly Undercover Brother movie tonight. Let's actually do "dinner and a movie" again some night soon when we have time to make a fun evening of it. Thank you for coming over!

Comments

Re: Rack next to the workshop?

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

Vibration isn't a huge deal here. The 'workshop' isn't the kind one would use hammers or large, repetitive instances of impact tools. Of what little vibration-inducing tool action (take that one out of context, I dareya!) occurs, the amount transmitted through the slab wouldn't be of much worry. Besides, the machines we have mounted there are surprisingly robust. FM and the webcomics I host have stayed up remarkably well. :)