One Man's Junk

We’ve lived here for a long time and we’ve got lots of room ,so many things accumulated through the years. I’m a bit of a packrat and a tinkerer (I call it niggling) so I’ve always seen possible uses of things that some people would throw away. I don’t laugh at those Appalachian yards with old cars among the weeds. Sometimes, parts can turn out to be quite an advantage. Years ago, when I was remodeling an old house, I had to remove a “farmer’s sink” from the kitchen. A farmer’s sink is a place to wash one’s hands after coming in from the fields for dinner (dinner, being in farm country, the big midday meal). No need to go into the bathroom or tromp around the lunch table in your dirty field clothes. It was a small sink near the door of the kitchen where you could wash your dirty hands… nothing more, nothing less. It was plumbed in with old pipe, circa 1930. It was fused into place. Without tearing a big messy hole in the plaster and lath horsehair wall in order to get a big wrench on the joint, I had to disconnect the drainpipe from the underside. You’d need a special plumbing tool to secure or turn the pipe; that would have been an expensive one-time-use tool. I ended up fashioning a tool out of galvanized pipe with a hacksaw. Old pipe left over from jobs done years ago; the kind of pipe that the lady of the house would say, “throw that old trash away.” My homemade tool worked. That was in our 1870 farmhouse in 1976. We moved to our self-constructed house in 1984. I brought that homemade tool with me and stashed it underneath our also homemade outbuilding. Around about 2006, our friends, were building a home near here and moving out of a circa 1900s house in Silver Spring; they needed to remove a “farmers’ sink” from their basement… and it was stuck. AHA! I was able to reach under my outbuilding and retrieve former piece of pipe trash. I have a photo of me “passing the pipe” on to my friend. The tool worked perfectly (damn! I wish I still that that thing). But of course, the overall result is that for every homemade “pipe tool” story there are about hundred “I’ll just hang on to this thingy”, maybe a thousand times, that results in a lot of stuff lying around. You should see my shop. No, no you shouldn’t. I have a hopeless task ahead of me. Likely, someone else will be throwing things into a dumpster and thinking: “This old fool was a nutjob.” In a related vein, I will write about all the 200 or so boards that are 60% too long, wide, or deep, 02% too small, too piney, too walnut, too nice oak, too knotted, too good, too thin, too thick, too plywoody, a little split, not good enough…. (I remember this board; it came from Uncle Fred….) “I can’t use THIS board!" That has resulted in me having a problem. See pic.