The Current Situation
It’s the end of an era… The kids are finally all moved out of our home of 20 years in Wekiva. And even though Ann and I have been here in Mount Dora for more than a decade now, we still have more than two decades worth of memories stored there. Or rather, I still have memories stored there. Memories I have no place to store here in our two bedroom, single bath bungalow.
That all changes now that the kids moved into their own house. It’s heartbreaking when we look at what used to be our beautiful home of 20 years, only to see it totally run down, unloved all these years later. The kids never did much to make it their home. From the looks of it, they didn’t do anything. Not even basic maintenance. But enough said. The issue now is how much money our “retirement fund” is going to lose because of the state of disrepair it’s in now.
Perhaps lose isn’t as accurate as how much less money we’ll get now than we could have if it still looked as good as when it was our home. That’s not to say we couldn’t choose to hire contractors to fix her up, but we’d stand to pay as much to do that as we would get back from the boost in the sale price. Beyond that loss, add the immediate sting to our pocketbook to pay the price for someone to come do all those things the kids couldn’t be bothered to do for all those years.
More Distractions
Why does this seemingly never ending theme of always something else that needs done first matter? It’s really starting to wear on me. I’m ready to get things squared away in the Barkyard, but ever since my last post, I’ve literally spent every weekend over at the other house in preparation to list it for sale. Ann and Nick have spent even more time over there. Cleaning up all the trash and yard debris, but mainly getting the pool sparkling blue from thick green.
It’s a half hour trip there from Mount Dora. Multiply that by two trips, morning and night, and it adds up to two hours lost every day to nothing but travel, not to mention the fuel cost. Two hours a day that the kids spending two minutes a day could have saved us by simply checking the chemicals and cleaning the filter. But enough sour grapes. Soon it will be someone else’s treasure, ready to be transformed into their dream home.
We bought it as a “fixer upper”, with plenty of potential. When Ann first saw the view from the back yard, she said, “I don’t care what the inside looks like, we’ll take it”. We remodeled every room except for two of the bedrooms. We even remade the patio around the pool, adding a pool slide and a bar complete with a Gen-Aire grill. Now it’s someone else’s turn to take that potential and turn it into their treasure.
It would be different if my day job didn’t take every single minute I’m logged on from me, distracting me from what I’d rather be doing, working on my garden scale pike. The Barkyard has been on the back burner ever since I went back to work, more than three years ago. And for far longer than I ever imagined it would. And tragically, it shows! Plot twist, now my long lost HO scale empire is the reason it remains on the back burner.
Packing Up Memories
My job now is to get the corner room cleaned out and packed up. Everything I want to keep from what I’ve accumulated over a lifetime. I lost count of the number of trash barrels I filled with old and outdated computer and electronics parts. Magazines from the ’80s and ’90s. Basically a bunch of “stuff” that had a place there, but is no longer useful to me, or anyone else for that matter.
It breaks my heart to throw away all the chips and now otherwise useless components that were meant to be used in projects for my HO scale model railroad. Projects that never materialized. Hundreds, if not thousands of TTL logic level chips, like the 7400 series. Old 8 bit microprocessors and support chips. Even spare 8Kx8 replacement dynamic RAM chips from when I repaired my Commodore 64 after our home in Palm Bay was struck by lightning and zapped it.
With things today measured in gigabytes and terabytes, it seems comical to even think about something in the kilobytes. Parts with top speeds of ten or twenty megahertz can’t compete with today’s multiple gigahertz clock speeds. The really sad part is I can buy something off the shelf that’s already fully integrated and does what I want for a handful of dollars. Why would I waste my time designing and building it from discrete, obsolete parts?
Considering how much real estate a discrete component implementation would require compared to the postage stamp sized Arduino that could perform the same functions, and more, it’s a no brainer why these obsolete parts are now useless. The only exception would as replacements for failed parts in an obsolete piece of equipment. But then the question is how useful is that obsolete piece of equipment compared to its modern equivalent?
My HO Scale Empire (Or What’s Left Of It)
A bit of history… I had a huge HO scale layout, spanning two bedrooms, one of which I called my office. The other used to be Nick’s bedroom, until he moved into his sister’s room when she moved out. I even cut tunnel passages through the drywall between the office and the corner bedroom. That all changed when we moved to Mount Dora and the kids moved back in there.
I’m hoping that just because I’m not talking about my garden scale pike, this HO scale discussion will still be of some interest. If not, it’s understandable. Anyone who’s ever started a model train layout knows it’s never finished. It’s a given. But this is going in the wrong direction entirely. Backwards. Having to dismantle everything I worked years to put together is not something I thought would be at the top of my priority list.
I had to dismantle the part of the layout that occupied my old office so our son-in-law could make it his office. That, too, was heartbreaking. Pulling up all the track and cork roadbed, removing track feeders, wiring and controllers. Then the real work began. Dismantling all the framework and carefully storing everything away in the corner room, with the understanding we would use that room for storage.
The plywood and L-girders were simply functional, meant to someday be covered with a beautifully stained veneer to match the ornate shelf brackets, with sweeping curves in the diagonal braces, crafted to mimic old railroad station architecture. Most of those pieces already made it to our Mount Dora home. The track and roadbed and HO scale structures remain there in the corner room.
The Last Of My HO Scale Empire
That was then. This is now. I had forgotten all the track and roadbed is still there on the bookshelf layout, high along the walls of the corner room. There are remnants of track and roadbed that remain where the coal mine used to sit on the main level along the wall to the office, complete with the holes for the tunnels in the drywall, still there after all this time. I patched them on the office side long ago.
Beyond all the trackwork, I have models of buildings and trackside structures, many of them kits still in their boxes awaiting assembly. The assembled structures I’ve had nearly my entire life, since grade school anyway. The coal mine for instance. The brewery. The rolling lift bridge. And many more. Those already assembled structures present the challenge of how to best store them in the smallest possible space… Without damaging them.
Beyond that are all the miscellaneous items, distributed across a diverse set of containers, including old Athearn blue boxes, assorted electronics cases, and even an old Dannon yogurt container. When I say miscellaneous, I mean tools, hardware, pieces parts of rolling stock, leftover model kit sprues, model train power packs, wiring, terminal strips, etc. Everything I’ve collected over the years for my HO scale empire.
Extraneous Information
So why all this extra information? To explain the lack of progress on the Barkyard. Why once again something else has taken higher priority. The good news is this “distraction” will help pave the way for our comfortable retirement. We stand to triple our money when we sell the house. Ann’s already retired. I’m not. I can’t wait, but I’ll have to, continuing to squirrel away 25% of my paycheck until then.
More good news is the progress in the garage here because of this distraction. Nowhere complete by any means, but many baby steps in the right direction. All the trestle making pieces are now in a large 90qt. storage bin, ready for organizer design and 3D printing. They were taking up all the “real estate” on the shelf over the carriage doors. Space that is now dedicated to storage bins that hold items seldom needed but not yet useless trash.
Some of those seldom needed items occupy most of the more valuable storage space above the wall cabinets over the work benches. While there’s not a whole lot of room to spare over the cabinets, what room there is would much better serve frequently needed items than seldom used ones. Items not used since going up “over the rafters” have been purged as well, making room for all the plastic stringer materials, just laying on the floor in front of the workbench.
Collateral Improvements
The garage is just one of the many “collateral improvements” underway, all thanks to needing more storage space. The only way to get there is to better organize the limited storage space available. Our Closet Lighting post details the addition of closet lighting, but doesn’t really touch on the amount of storage space that was freed up by cleaning out the closet.
The office has undergone a number of reorganizations too, incrementally wringing a bit more storage space here and there. But the biggest improvement yet was triggered by making space for the tall file cabinet coming here from the other house. The two “half sized” file cabinets have been here pretty much since we moved here. The time has come for the tall cabinet to move here too.
For the longest time, the color laser printer sat atop a stack of three large storage bins, full of HO treasures from previously dismantling the office portion of the layout. It sits at the end of the long stretch of cabinets in my office. This has a number of negative consequences. First is obstructed access, both to the bottom of the bookcase and the HO items stored in the bins beneath because of the printer sitting on top of them. Second is the lack of space for the printer anywhere else.
In preparation for that tall file cabinet’s arrival, the plan is to stack the two short cabinets atop one another and slide the tall cabinet in next to them. Same footprint on the floor, but twice as tall. Actually a little more than twice as tall, but you get the idea. There’s an assemble it yourself bookshelf unit that sits on top of the short cabinets at the moment, so the contents will need to go elsewhere and the shelf itself put out to the curb.
Storage Improvement Phases
Now we get to a third consequence for the printer. Where does it get power? The wall outlet will be blocked once the file cabinets are in place. The solution is a new surge strip with a “wall hugger” cord, just long enough to reach the printer on top of the file cabinets. Phase one complete. Bookshelf gone, contents elsewhere, file cabinets stacked, and printer relocated. That eliminates one other negative consequence. Now the front panel is at eye level. And legible!
Phase two is sort through the HO treasures and reduce the bin count from three to two. The plan is to stack those two bins on top of the two large storage bins already in the corner of the bedroom next to my dresser. There’s room for six more bins, including the two everything gets sorted into now. Stacking them in the corner reveals these new 90qt. bins are larger than expected, but thankfully there’s still enough space for them.
Phase three is sort through the lower, sliding door section of the bookcase, now that moving those bins has restored access to it. There’s quite a bit of wasted space, even with all those CDs and DVDs in there. The original thought was access was seldom needed, so why not store them where access is difficult or limited at times. New plan. Move them elsewhere and store the plastic model kits in their place to take up that wasted space.
Those plastic model kits were the last things to come over from the other house and are now sitting on top of the bookcases. While all of them may not fit in that lower space, most of them will, freeing up the space on top for things that need more frequent access. Those models will have to wait until I have the time to spend on them. Like once I’m retired. At least, that’s the plan.
Future Distractions
Eventually I want to “remake” the bookcases. Those bookcases were designed and built to be “massive”, because they occupied either side of the massive stone fireplace at the other house. And while they do provide a huge amount of storage space, they were never designed to fit the space they occupy. If anything, the exact opposite is true. The space they occupy was designed to fit around them.
Where they sit now influenced the size and design of the new bedroom closets here in Mount Dora before they were even built. Each bookcase is 32″ wide. I allowed a bit over twice that, 65″ total, to leave some “wiggle room” between the outside wall and the back of the closets. When the closets and the back porch remodeling were finally completed, it was apparent I’d forgotten to take into account the width of the baseboards and the bookcase trim pieces.
Some “minor” rework with a backsaw and problem solved. The larger problem is how to redesign them to better suit that space? Maybe it’s better to say rework them into a design that reuses as much of them as possible, if possible. The bookcases aren’t quite 22″ deep, and there’s only about 18″ between the end of the cabinets the bookcase on that side. Where they meet is a blind corner cabinet situation.
The main (structural) shelf is lower than the cabinets too, 30″ vs. 36″ off the floor, so simply extending the countertop to the bookcases won’t work. But that’s a future distraction. If it’s not apparent by now, it should be obvious why it takes so long to get anything done on the Barkyard. In this case, coming up with the design, finding a place for everything sitting on the bookcases, then disassembling and reassembling them to match the design.
The Next Distraction
Unfortunately, the next higher priority item is filing the taxes. We always file for an extension, which is why the deadline is October 15th, and not April 15th as you would expect. Hopefully it goes quickly and smoothly. As much as preparing for the sale of the house has been a source of friction between Ann and myself, it doesn’t hold a candle to tax time. It’s always guaranteed to bring those “suppressed emotions” to the surface.
Always something else that needs done first!
Leave Us A Comment
If you made it all the way through to the end of this post, thank you. I hope you understand why this is important to us. Even if we didn’t really discuss the Barkyard all that much, other than to explain why we still have no progress to show all this time later. Call them excuses. Call them what you will. Soon we’ll have all the time that was taken from us by everything else that was higher priority.
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Stay tuned…