The Crawl Space
I admit that I was frustrated with my prospects of having place to work. I wanted my shop to be in the barn, but in order to do that, I had to have a place set up to work in order to work on the barn. That left the crawl space, or what I was mistakenly calling a “basement.” Apparently, the two are different.
What made me think I had a basement was there is an area high enough for me to stand up. But since it’s not finished out, think dirt floors, it’s not a basement.
The problem with the crawl space is that it was packed full of things we moved with us, but didn’t have room for upstairs. In our move, we downsized and have been challenged with what to keep and what to give away. We gave away a lot.
Given that, the crawl space was chaos and I was at a loss about how to use what space I had efficiently. I started praying about it and even asked Heidi to pray. Simple prayer: LORD help me bring order to the chaos in the crawl space. The LORD did the very same thing in the beginning, so I felt it was a reasonable prayer.
It was only then that things began to come together.
The Work Bench
The first thing I needed to do was reassemble my work bench, which would free up space for my shelves, and order would soon follow. It was a simple plan, but while the chaos ruled, I couldn’t see how easy the solution was.
Reassembly began first by clearing out a space to put the bench. Remember from it’s construction post, it was rather large: 8′ long and 3 1/2 feet wide. There was a space that would work well. I got that space cleared out, and started putting the behemoth table together.
It was a fight. I would have thought it would have been like putting together a Lego set… wait. I never could put those together the way they were to go, and the table was much more simple. OK. Perhaps we see part of the problem.
But I did manage to get it together, with lots of clamps, drilling new holes and ONLY ONE trip to Lowe’s for missing lag bolts. I finished most of it last night. The sweetest part of getting it together? Leaving my tools on the work bench where they belong and are easy to find. That was a small piece of order in the chaos.
Planing
As for my new planer, I did get to use it before I started assembling the work bench. I finally splurged and bought a DeWalt 735x planer. With the prospective work on the barn, I felt it would come in handy, especially when re-purposing most of the wood from the older sheds. I plan to use that wood to put in a floor in the barn, once I remove all the stalls.
I needed a test run. If you notice the picture for this post, you will see two pieces of wood. I picked up both of them from ground next to one of the sheds. The one that isn’t planed is full of nails, which means, I won’t be planing it. But the one one was free of nails. You can see how it turned out. It looked just like the one on the left. Now it worth using on … something. Don’t know yet. But it’s a great piece of wood. It just needed a bit of care.
I was wondering about the green hue to the planed wood. Grok said it was either that the wood was treated, and still had some of the chemical on it, or that was from being on the ground. If it is the latter, that should be easy to remove with a sander.
