The Treasure Room

There’s a room in the house I don’t often talk about. Years ago, I used to call it the “tool room”, but, as it turns out, the tools I own will never be confined to just one room in this house, and so the tool room became a catch-all for pretty much everything that didn’t have anywhere else to go…

I think it’s cute that some people have a “junk drawer.” Ohhh, you have a drawer? I have an entire bedroom filled with shit I may or may not need, can’t bring myself to get rid of, and likely need a map and a band of pirates to find anything in…

The thing is, every once in a while I’ll be in the middle of a project and think, “You know what I really need? A [fill in the blank]…” And then I walk into the treasure room, and this thing that I need– I thing I’m sure I didn’t own but decided to look for “just in case”– shows up right in front of my face. It’s like my very own Room of Requirement at this point.

Anyone with half a brain knows you should mess with the magic of such a place by organizing it, right? So I didn’t. For four years. But, as you may be able to tell from the pictures of that room, I recently ran out of floor space.

Like, this room went from a charming collection of tools and spare-parts to like, dangerously close to hoarder territory.

Also, if I haven’t mentioned this in every single post for the last month, I have a kitchen renovation coming up, and all the shit from my current kitchen needs to go somewhere else. Like, perhaps, in this spare room that serves no purpose other than to store stuff. Maybe?

So that was the project for this weekend. Get the treasure room cleaned up, organized, and start packing up the kitchen.

This was after Day 1:

Technically better? I mean, there’s more floor space, at least. But then I decided what I really needed was more (larger) shelving, and in order to put that in place, well…

Let’s just say things got worse before they got better.

I also decided to try to put a couple of temporary shelves on this wall…

I have no idea what is up with that wall, but there’s some kind of drywall-over-plaster-over-masonry situation going on (the living room fireplace is directly on the other side of it) and it took 7 holes and getting out the damn hammer-drill and some tapcons to get a single shelf in place. #because2016

The good news is that right about this time my mom showed up with pizza and wine because my mom is awesome…

She took charge of the shopvac and packing up the kitchen while I continued to organize the treasure room. Turns out I have an entire large rack’s worth of equipment only relating to bees and chickens…

Yeah. That’s where I’m at in life. BUT I CAN OPEN THE DOOR TO SAID RACK FROM THE LIVING ROOM, so that’s something huge. I don’t even know the last time I was able to do that. (This room has two doors, one from the living room, one from the downstairs bath.)

I also found some fun little things I forgot I had, like this phonograph, for example…

At some point I’ll find the time to put it back in working order.

I also found this can of paint, which actually doesn’t look very special…

But I’m pretty sure this is the can of paint my mom and I used when we broke into the Liberty House (before I officially owned it) and painted over all the water spots on the walls and ceilings so the appraiser wouldn’t know the roof leaked (which would have made it impossible for me to get a loan in the 30 day timeframe I’d been given to close on the house from the auction.) On our way out this quart of paint started leaking in a bag and we ended up getting paint all over the mudroom tile, driveway, back of my car, and then somehow my coat and the whole drivers seat.

When reminiscing about this my mom looked at me and was like, “well, we really aren’t good bandits.” (Truth.)

I distinctly remember wrapping the foil around the can because that was all we had at the time. Also, pretty sure we weren’t even drinking… weird.

Anyway, by the end of two days there was some remarkable progress in this room…

Before:

After:

It’s so amazing to have this room cleaned up for the first time in four years, I can’t even tell you…

I now have a designated spot for plumbing, electrical, door hardware, paint, and all the gear related to the bees and chickens (honestly, I didn’t even know I owned three different heat lamps.)

So awesome…

It’s not pretty, by any means, but it’s way more functional and it allowed me to move some critical stuff out of the kitchen. As far as that goes, preparations continue and I’ll probably start legitimate demo in a couple of weeks.

Until then, more packing, and probably filling this room right back up with boxes from the kitchen. It never ends…

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