Basement progress... Phase 2 complete...

Phase 2 went quickly since I had all the materials. Most interesting problem was trying to drive screws into the old timber in the house. Apparently after 91 years the wood gets pretty tough. In any case, there was a bit of work moving things out of the way and then realizing that the pallet that we use to keep stuff off the damp floor was going to need to be cut down to allow for the new shelves. Here is a picture of it partially framed and then finished with stuff put away. We reclaimed many square feet of floor space…

Of course this has generated a bunch of debris that now needs to be packaged up to be acceptable to the trash folks… But, now there is clean space to work on other projects. Next up, getting some bicycles in operating condition.

Basement progress... Phase 1 complete...

Whew, I put the plywood shelf skins on today. The most challenging part of that process was digging the sheets of plywood out of my pile of scrap wood in the garage. Remind me to be more thoughtful about what order I stack it in when I’m done with all of this… So here is the finished product for phase 1:

It has allowed me to get rid of an old wheeled storage cart that was on the left freeing up floor space. Now I’ve got room to spare and everything is well separated from the sometimes damp floor. On to phase two tomorrow, on the other side of the room. Have to clear a bunch of stuff out of the way to get there.

Why not start in the basement...

When we first moved into this house twenty four years ago, we went through the usual first time homeowner spasm of house projects. There was painting, wall papering, gardening, and building storage and work space in the basement. As with many folks, our ardor for house projects waned as other priorities took over. So here I am twenty four years down the road and I’ve decided to work on building some more storage in the basement for tools and materials etc… One part of it will be next to the workbench that I built back then (and I really don’t recall why I didn’t tear out the decrepit table they had in the corner at the time) and the other will replace some rickety metal shelving I have over by the chimney base.

Here’s what the old table (which could be from 1929 based on the lumber) looked like:

You’ll have to imagine all the crap I had to clear off of it and from below it to get to this state. Here is the result of today’s efforts in breaking it down and removing it.

Next thing is to buy and somehow transfer the mess of 2x4’s that I need back to the house in the Audi… Maybe today, maybe tomorrow…

Projects, projects, projects...

For a while now I’ve been thinking (pretty much every day) about projects I’d like to work on, if I had time, and now I have time. So recently I’ve been going around touching each semi-started/not-started project and seeing how I feel about them. I’ve got a coding project that has to do with drawing charts and graphs using block graphics in a terminal window using curses… I’m thinking about dashboards for systems that only require SSH and no HTTP servers or other tunnels… I’ve got a huge pile of photographs going back to 2007, and I’d like to select a bunch of them and turn them into some form of video art… I’ve got some code there too, not sure if it’ll be coding or just using desktop tools… Then there is composition of some music inspired/influenced by the video art… I’m not a talented musician, I’ve had some training in Jazz improvisation and I have some understanding of the basics of music theory… It is gong to be a project just to discover a workflow that produces something that resembles a tune… Returning to piano lessons is also part of that one… I’ve got a robot kit that I want to build and play with… I’ve got at least one short story that I would like to finish, it’ll likely lead to others… Then there’s getting my bicycles back on the road and getting back out… that’ll have to wait… And then there’s the enormous TBR pile that I need to develop an attention span to read my way through… Travel… well that’ll have to wait too.

I don’t really have a timeline for any projects, the things that are keeping my attention the longest right now are playing the piano ( I’m trying to record my sessions now to be able to go back and analyse them/start from them/harvest any good ideas out of them… ) and reading. I’m also just allowing myself to watch TV, have a nap, surf the web, go for a walk, clean the house or whatever, whenever… I’ve lived from one job related task to the next for thirty-nine years, I don’t expect to be able to just become immersed and focus over night. So far the lack of structure isn’t upsetting me at all, in fact I feel a lot less anxious, and that’s saying something in these difficult times.

Who knows perhaps time will reveal that none of these is really what I want to focus on… not a problem, nothing hangs on me starting or finishing any of them.