cleaning the shop... the saga begins

With new bike building behind me, I turned my attention to cleaning the shop. Today in five hours I have filled five black bags and stuffed junk in three different garbage cans. My wife uses plastic bags for the household trash so it is easy to shove bits of metal in the corner of the big cans the city uses for curbside pick up.

When one builds with junker bikes, one accumulates lots of bike bits and pieces. I had two black bags filled with old worn out bike tires. I still have a large supply of tires with 25% or less ware on them. Not to mention a stack of good wheels. I have three or four bike frames laying about waiting for me to decide what if anything to do with them.

One of them (the old Columbia racer) I think will become a pedal only bike. If I ever get a bike rack for my car I might just carry it to the bike trail and ride the trail on bike instead of walking it. Then again I think walking is better exercise.

I figure I am about 10 to 20% complete with the shop cleaning. It seems like a good place to stop for now. I have a goal in mind, so I will stay at it till the shop is reorganized. Usually I lose interest at this point unless I do have a definite plan for the space.

I have a food freezer to remove as well as a small wall I built to make a closet for it. Geeze it just grows on ya.

Day two:

Well I am up to ten black bags full of trash... I also took down a false partition. I put it up to make a closet around an upright freezer. I took the freezer to the curb all by myself. I'm darn proud of that. Fat old sixty four year old man... Of course I took it apart first lol. The door in one trip. The compressor unit went down in the second trip then the body of that monster. Actually it was easier than I thought.

The porcelain covered box slid as though it were on bad wheels. But it did side along. I think it was rolling on the beads of sand and tiny stones that cover move every concrete surface that is not swept. When it got to the curb I flipped it on the side and there were very few scratches even.

The scrap metal people found it an hour or so later. The first one took the racks and the compressor. A half hour after that a second one stopped and shoved the box into a station wagon. They must just prowl around looking for things to scrap out.

I swept the floor a little so now I just have to find a place for all the stuff. The stuff I put on the work bench while to did the reconstruction work.

It did make a huge difference in space. In my case my coloring is done with a rattle can out in the back yard lol....

Of course I can't find anything now//// It's kinda like after my first brain tumor surgery at forty. I go back for my checkup and I said to the doctor, "I hate that I can't play the piano."

He said with a concerned look on his face, "Did yo play often before?"

"No I never played the piano in my life. I always hated that I couldn't."

I can't find a thing in the shop but I never could."

You have to be kidding on the pictures. I would have to have had a place to stand to shoot one. There was no place. Tell you what when I get the junk to the curb, I will shoot you a shot of the mountain of trash. Remember though that the freezer has already gone.

I am saving some useless stuff just for the heck of it. I have an old sign that used to be attached to the rear of my truck. It gave the name of my studio and phone number. I am going to hang that somewhere in the shop.

I am going to have a new sign made for my bike as soon as I find where to put it. I'm going to draw one of those stick figures with a oversized camera in his hands. The caption will read, "I work for food."

So you wanted pictures.... This is AFTER the cleaning so you can see I have upgraded the level of sanitation to satisfactory for a pig sty...




remember this is after ten black bags of trash, half the big city garbage can, and tossing the upright freezer. Use your imagination and you will get a pretty good idea of how bad it was.

This trash is all from the smaller shop, 8x11 feet to be exact. I need to remove at least this much again, but I don't know if I will or not.

very carefully... especially with a soldering iron.