Move 'em on out!

We have had several days of beautiful weather - warm temperatures, blue skies, and light breezes. What doesn't fit with that description? We are talking about early January in northern Ohio where cold temperatures, grey, cloudy skies, and frigid winds are the norm.

But I was lucky enough to be able to spend those days in my wood shop. Since my shop is in a garage with inadequate heat, this weekend was a golden invitation to be comfortable while get moving on some projects.

I installed three rebuilt pegboard panels - two over my work bench and one beside my bandsaw. With those installed I was able to rehang all the tools that had covered my workbench.

I have two sets of goals this year in my workshop. One is to clear away a lot of old, half-done projects or pieces and parts from previous projects that I was keeping around to use up the extra supplies. The other goal is to complete a list of brand new projects of furniture, shop jigs, lathe projects, and gifts. Today's efforts were all to clear out some of the old projects.

By coincidence I was looking through this list of old projects this morning and coming to two conclusions. First, I was listing some projects that I realized I really did not want to do anymore. They were probably old and half-done because I did not like the project and it would really not be fun even if I finished it. So, my first conclusion was just drop that project. If I am doing this for fun why am I holding onto projects that obviously were not fun to do?

Also, there were projects that just seemed to mushroom from one or two to six to eight because I had the spare parts. I had completed a few in the past but still had enough supplies to make a few more. This kept mushrooming and I was beginning to feel I would never get the project done. For these I just set an arbitrary number and decided when I hit that number I was going to stop no matter what supplies were left.

Those two decisions seemed to liberate me. I was no longer anticipating having to work on projects I really didn't enjoy and I was seeing an end to what was beginning to feel like a production job. With that done I really moved to the remaining items and started having some fun on a warm day in January.