I had a thought recently as I was watching Maureen rebuild a lamp.  She has been very good about reusing and re-purposing lamps and other such goods over the years. We got talking about lamp parts and have been talking about building collections of things we might need to repair our current goods in the case of shortages.

This has made me think about storage.  A frustrating constant of my life is knowing that I have the part or piece to fix something, but not being able to find it.  I have chronicled the collection of screws, nails, hinges and such I inherited from my father, which he inherited from his father.  I am a pack rat that hates to throw out.  That was painfully evident when I recently had trouble deleting emails from years ago.  As it was pointed out to me, correctly with love and humor, I have issues getting rid of the real and the virtual.

So how is one to store these items? Currently I store tools in recycled kitchen cabinets.  They are set along two walls of our "tool room."  This allows some room in the middle to work if needed.  The cabinets are heavy and don't move much. Some of the cabinets are long, about 5-6 feet, and others are about 2 feet.  My latest thoughts are to separate each into about 2 foot sections with each section holding a specific kind of tool.  I've done this a little.  I have a set of drawers for the woodworking tools, and another for the wrenches and sockets. By breaking these into 2 foot sections I can use a dolly and move each set of tools if I want.  Generally one shouldn't take to moving cabinets around, but it might help if moving is needed.

More importantly I've come to think is by organizing the tool sets, I can minimize the floor space needed for storage.  This could allow for a cabinet being set aside to store parts for repair.  One for plumbing, one for electrical, one for bike parts, etc.  Currently those are in boxes in various places.  Hopefully this would mean a place for parts and also the getting rid of the parts and pieces that will never be used and that are cluttering too many places.

Now all it takes to make this work is the doing.

P.S.  This isn't our tool room.  Ours is messier.