Saturday, January 13, 2024

Tackling our home's worst room

The gauntlet has been thrown down. My birthday is still a few days off, but I've already given Brian notice of what home I want for my traditional DIY birthday present. And it's probably the tallest order I've ever given him, because my request is to tackle the very worst room in our house. This one.


This room has several functions. It's a laundry room, a workshop, an overflow pantry, and a storage room for a vast assortment of stuff, including:

  • Two and a half bicycles (two complete ones and parts of a third)
  • A dozen folding chairs
  • A 50-pound sack of birdseed
  • Two ladders
  • Two fire extinguishers
  • 30 gallons of water stored up for emergencies
  • Our entire CD collection (serving as backup for the digital files we actually listen to)
  • My old boom box and cassette tapes, which tend to get used only during power outages
  • Numerous power tools, including a miter saw, an air compressor, and a wet-dry vacuum
  • Assorted containers of paint, stain, glues, and solvents
  • A sleeping bag
  • My seldom-used guitar's even more seldom-used case
  • A large box full of equipment for starting seeds

And that's far from a complete list. With all this stuff and more crammed into a roughly 11-by-15-foot space, it's very difficult to find anything. It's also sometimes difficult, and always distasteful, to spend any time in the room. It's not heated at all, and it's lit by two cold-white tube lights (one old fluorescent and one newer LED strip). The floor is raw concrete, the ceiling has exposed joists with various wires and pipes running through, and there are two cinder block walls and two frame walls with the insulation exposed. 

I'm not expecting or even hoping to make this room into a beautiful and cozy retreat. But I do at least want it to be (a) functional and (b) not actively unpleasant to be in. My goals are:

  1. To get rid of everything currently in the room that doesn't need to be there.
  2. To organize the rest of the room's contents so that I know where everything is and can physically lay hands on it. If I go into the room looking for an extension cord, I don't want to have to pull every box off the shelves until I find the one labeled "wires and cables." (Oh yeah, that's another thing in the room that wasn't on the list above.)
  3. To cover up the insulation with something. It doesn't have to be a nicely plastered and painted wall. A sheet of OSB plywood would be sufficient, and certainly preferable to what's there now.
  4. To have the room look at least reasonably tidy. I know it's probably still going to be cluttered, but I'd like the clutter to be more neatly organized. At the very least, I'd like to be able to walk all the way around the room without obstruction.

Based on our previous track record, I figure we'll be working on this for the rest of the winter and probably most of the spring. But hey, it'll keep us off the street.

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