This Space for Rent

Bailing out the Aegean Stables

My supertrivial carpentry project for the day today is a second workbench for the basement. The first workbench cleaned the basement up to the point where projects became feasable, but then I brought home and dismantled 7 more pallets, and the combination of our usual regular SCRAP habit and the pallet wood started to make the basement unfit for human habitation. Plus, even though I had this nice workbench, I didn't really have a place where I could put projects that were glued up and clamped, so they either migrated to the floor (where I'd have to walk around them) or just sat on the workbench (right in the middle of what I'd like to pretend is a work surface).

So, late this afternoon when I had to distract the bears for a few hours, I assembled the top and legs of this new bench. It's all pallet wood from work, even the big hunk of plywood that makes up the top. It's going to have a couple of shelves underneath, and I set up the ends of the tabletop so that the forklift openings in the pallets open into a thin shelf that can be used to store pipe clamps while I'm not using them. I've not added the shelves yet because they may require a power saw, and if I run a power saw at 11:30pm, it will not go over well with any of the other people in this house.

My hope is that I can put most of my free-floating SCRAPpy stuff into the two shelves, and move the parts I've got on deck for my next projects (right now I'm looking at building a tile PC case; the Factory Case doesn't really have enough horsepower to run a modern version of Linux, KDE, and Mozilla Superoyster (it did have enough horsepower to run Windows, but Microsoft went evil and I don't wish to use their operating systems until they pay penance for their sins) and I need to use a motherboard with a faster processor, and I don't wish to pay for it while I've got a couple of AMD K7/1333's lying around gathering dust. But I'm not going to use an ugly case, so I have to build a case before I can start using the faster processor. And I can't build the case until I clear enough room on the workbench to lay out the tile. And I can't clear enough room on the workbench until I relocate a lot of my art supplies to this new workbench) over to this new surface, where they won't get in the way of actually assembling them.

And if the new workbench isn't enough, I ripped a cabinet out of the stupid room, and I'll be able to attach a back and a top to it as soon as I relocate some of the non-essential things in the basement onto this new workbench.

Eventually, I'm going to convince the best that I'm not just fooling myself when I say I want to build a summer cabin. Maybe I'll make it out of pallets.