Alan D. Miller
| Special to The Columbus Dispatch
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We lost an hour of sleep last night in the leap forward to daylight saving time.
It’s just a reminder of the many hours of sleep I have lost thinking about all of the projects facing me as spring arrives and the weather turns warmer.
Winter is the time to make plans – to map out all the ways you can spend time and money fixing up your house, garage, barn, and yard. I won’t even get into the list of truck, tractor, motorcycle, and car projects that await us this summer.
At the moment, I’m still basking in the glow of my last major accomplishment at the basement workbench, which was to find it.
I’m confident that those who know me would say that I’m organized – in a pile-making sort of way. I’m not great at filing papers or tools or parts in the way that super-organized people do. A former colleague at The Dispatch, for example, organized his soup cans alphabetically.
I am not that person.
But I know where things are, and I can point you to a pile to find something specific. Until I get deep into a project; that’s when I’m so focused on the project that I fail to put tools and supplies away properly, and many of them land in a big pile on the workbench. So the annual New Year’s cleaning of the bench turns up all sorts of interesting things − and gets the wheels spinning toward the next round of projects.
One thing that revealed itself in the annual cleanup is a bullet-shaped, black-and-white Sunbeam Mixmaster that every person my age will remember from their childhood. Every mom and grandma I knew had one, and the one we inherited from my bride’s grandmother needs an overhaul. It runs, but it needs cleaning, and its stiff, 70-year-old grease needs to be replaced.
It’s on my list, along with a 3/8-inch Craftsman electric drill with a chrome exterior so shiny that it could be a hood ornament on a car from the 1930s. I bought the 50-year-old drill for $5 at an “antique” mall while visiting my folks in North Carolina. I thought it looked cool, and it works, but it needs the same kind of love and care that the Mixmaster requires.
The thought of working on these bench projects makes my heart soar in the same way I swooned when, as a 12-year-old snooping for treasures in my grandparents’ barn, I cleaned up a 1930s-era Atwater Kent radio, plugged it in, turned it on, and it played music!
Then I remember that spring is upon us, and bench work is winter work − those things you do when snow is falling and you can’t prune fruit trees or paint the house or rebuild the deck.
Now, before the daffodils and tulips bloom, is the time to seriously plan summer and fall projects, and my list is already very long.
At my house, we need to paint at least one side of the exterior, and maybe two sides. We never change the colors, so we can paint one side at a time and avoid the cost and hassle of painting an entire house all at once. The north side needed painting last year, and it will get paint this summer, one way or another.
If I’m able to get two sides done in one summer, I’ll also hit the south side, which takes a beating from the sun and prevailing winds and needs paint more often than any other side.
Daughter No. 1, who lives in a 1980s-era house, needs a new deck. I have promised her that we will get that done this year. It’s not just a glorified patio. It’s a second-floor deck just off her kitchen, and it and the wooden staircase to the backyard are used multiple times daily by her and three doggies.
She also could use a new roof, so, wow, we have a couple of big projects on the list at her house.
Daughter No. 2 has a list so long that it’s hard to see the end of it. She has a house built around 1900 and has been restoring it for the past four years. Her focus this year is to update the garage so that it’s more project-friendly. That means creating separate workbenches for traditional repair work and for gardening.
And Daughter No. 3 lives at the family farm in a house built in the 1930s – next door to her grandpa, who lives in a house built in 1904. The two of them could keep me in projects for the next decade.
And even without a time change, this is why I’m losing sleep these days.
Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.
youroldhouse1@gmail.com
@youroldhouse
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