Hey, everyone, this is Jason writing! Theoretically this is a shared blog between myself and Janelle, but she does almost all the heavy lifting for it, so whenever I actually sit down to contribute it feels like a guest blog entry.
Before I jump in to the shop deep clean topic, I feel compelled to offer a few of my thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic:
My heart goes out to all my human family. What, I wonder, will this look like in Kibara or Mumbai? And, as my brother mentioned last night on a family Zoom call (video conferencing), the mighty distraction that this coronavirus furnishes will be used as cover for all manner of atrocities and abuses. He wondered about the refugees of the Syrian war who were caught between at least three hostile powers, and about whose fate the news cycle has suddenly gone silent. Fearsome indeed!
But for my more immediate society-mates, there is still plenty of pathos to fill my thoughts. There is the isolation of quarantine for residents of elder-care facilities and others who contend with loneliness enough in normal times. There are alarmed and disappointed families leaving threadbare stores with less of what they needed than what they came for. And of course there is the dread of knowing each of us will probably lose someone we know to this virus, and many more may bear its literal scars for a long time, if not permanently.
For our part, we contend with some of the same anxiety and worry as most others are at present, but in practical terms we are fine. On that same Zoom call, a brother-in-law asked everyone what extra preparations we've each made for this crisis. Janelle and I both stayed silent and let others answer, and I suspect for the same reasons: It feels unseemly to point out at this moment that there is nothing additional we could think of that we had to prepare or stock up on; the land has provided for us, and we have cultivated a practice of the meeting of our own needs on location. Surely if this becomes the kind of crisis that begins to erode basic services such as electricity or other energy supplies we will have some unpleasant comeuppances, and if our neighbors become desperate in any way before we've felt the pinch, of course their suffering will be blended into our lives in real ways: we will share what we have.
But that's not exactly the kind of crisis I think this is. This is about trying to continue the remarkable achievement enjoyed by wealthy, modern humans of largely cheating disease and death out of their customary toll. This crisis implies serious economic consequences, and will exact a high price of personal loss. Flattening the curve, as they say, will (if we can work together to achieve it) go a long way towards minimizing the loss of life and the overburdening of our medical system which was already convulsing with the politicization of its inherent challenges.
I've been expecting a pandemic for many years. I have felt that we are living on borrowed time: the Ebola epidemic, which would have exacted a far more devastating scenario had it reached pandemic status, failed to materialize on the scale I thought it would. The same goes for SARS and one or two others. I can't shake the feeling that the COVID-19 is the practice run for the really big one (or ones). In the analysis that will be done after this episode has ramped back down to walking pace there will be lots to learn from various groups' responses and management schemes. South Korea, it looks like, will be a shining example of success. The United States of America will, to my view, be a cautionary tale of the power of hubris, apathy, ignorance, propaganda, greed, and polarization to cripple a society's ability to solve its own problems cooperatively.
In the midst of that snarl, we at Tangly Woods are enjoying and will enjoy solid relationships with neighbors, a well-stocked pantry and freezer, gardens that just today yielded a bucketful of sweet turnips (free of coronavirus-infested schmutz) and which will continue to yield abundantly, animals that support us with their bodies and products, and all of this from a homestead paid off in full and a home heated by wood cut from the land. Our life under quarantine would be rich and full, and in fact not much different from usual except for spending a lot more time together! Thinking on this situation is of course in part gratifying, or at least relieving. But it also pains me deeply: how many visitors of all races, ethnicities, and economic brackets have expressed the wish to be able to live this way? Too many to count and remember. In times like this, the practicalities behind these often wistful expressions suddenly seem urgent and raw, and I bear the dual moral shames of being a member of a society that utterly fails to value access to land and food sovereignty and the realization that it is in part my racial and economic privilege that has allowed this "gratifying" situation to develop successfully for us. The COVID-19 crisis will only deepen the fire in my belly to work on behalf of food and livelihood sovereignty and liberation for all, and especially for the most historically and currently disadvantaged categories of person among us.
Now for the shop shed story:
The shed that houses our wood shop is a prefab purchased by Janelle's parents to store their extra stuff while the in-law quarters was being built, with the notion that once their furnishings could be moved into the quarters we'd "re-tool" (pun welcomed) it as a wood shop for all of us to use. Everyone knew, of course, that I would be the main user of the space, at least until Mom and Dad moved here more like full-time. In practice this has meant that the gravity is constantly towards me being the organizer and decision-maker for the space, while others function as guests there. The time frame for Mom and Dad's permanent relocation is still in question; all we know is that it is getting inexorably closer all the time because that's the way time works. So as time goes along I get more and more uncomfortable with being the "boss" of a space that is intended to be shared.Since a few years back when we discovered the abiding fruitfulness and joy of the "deep clean" concept, we've never managed, until this year, to extend its benefits to our more utilitarian spaces, such as the garage (that's one's not even technically mostly a "shared" space...they just graciously allow us to use it!), the laundry room, the garden shed, outdoor junk piles, under the shop shed and now the shop. The items found in these spaces can't always be evaluated using the residential-space criterion of whether it brings one joy. My bucket of reclaimed nails, for example, was not bringing me much in the way of joy. But it did reflect and embody lots of practical duty and has saved me countless trips to town. Is preventing annoyance the same thing as bringing joy? Hmm.
Anyway, the shop needed the treatment, and badly! Even I didn't work in there all too often, so it easily became the repository for things I didn't know where else to go with or which I saw potential in but didn't have time or a plan to use immediately. Also, since I didn't often need to share the space with others, my habitual preference for the provision of others' needs over my own ease and comfort influenced me to disrespect the order of that space. Especially as a space becomes cluttered and crowded, it's easy for me to procrastinate on putting things away. The demanding pace of homestead and family life doesn't help, either: dump and run has been a coping strategy and that space has been largely invisible to others day to day, so accountability has been low.
Given all that, Janelle is right, I think, to have remarked several times during the process on my ability to have used the space functionally over the years for project after project, and my ability to find just the right fastener or material scrap when needed. A neighbor, friend, former employer and mentor of mine with whom I shared many personality traits before his passing exhibited this same seeming miracle to an even more astounding degree. Their barn was full to the gills of bits of this and that from 3 or 4 decades of life on a hardworking farm. The stacks and shelves that constituted a dizzying and impenetrable array to the average person off the street had a nearly exact replica constructed in his mind; when I was completing some job or other and needed some little doohickey to finish the task, I would always check with him before running to town or pausing the job, and he could often direct me from the comfort of his living room to exactly the right spot where there resided a box with ten years of dust on it that contained just what I needed, or anyway something that could be made to work. This world is full of wonders!
In December we had decided to turn our winter's project attention not to building out yet another of our homestead development dreams but instead to the refreshing of the aforementioned utilitarian spaces. Knowing that, I think my brain went into full procrastination mode, since I knew we'd be getting to it soon, so I neglected even the minimal maintenance I usually performed. Resultingly, by the time the date for the shop deep clean came around, it had degenerated to a truly unusable space. Returning it to some usefulness would have meant no more than an hour of two of concentrated time, but this time that would NOT do!
We were determined to do this well, and I personally felt driven to make this a space that could truly invite others to use it practically and aesthetically. For Janelle's Dad, especially, I knew that his shop time was intended as relaxing time, and it would be hard for him to really relax in a chaotic physical space. This was not pressure he was putting on...it was my choice. The challenge is to maintain a supply of tools, fasteners, and materials that supplies our homestead needs, while occupying a limited space and allowing suitable room to work. And it should feel good to be in there, too! It's a matter of pride, practicality, and of reducing barriers to Mom and Dad's ability to feel this place as their true home. From a design standpoint, this is an exciting challenge! From a personal process standpoint, I had good reason to dread the majority of it.
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| Not sure this portrays how Jason felt starting this project but the picture needed to be included somewhere!! |
1) Remove all removable contents of shop shed and place them in wood shed, garage and common room. I had wonderful help from Janelle and Dad on this part. We left in place only some of the lumber on the lumber racks that had already recently been sorted.2) Clean shed. Once empty, this was not hard (nor did it need to be done well at this juncture because of what was coming next). Janelle did most of it.
3) Finish wiring shed. My job. I set boxes and ran wires, using all reclaimed or leftover wire scraps and boxes.
4) Tear apart a bunch of reclaimed (free) packing pallets to get the 1/2 in. thickness wood from the faces for covering the walls. Dad did probably most of this, starting before we dug into the rest of the work and working on it here and there over the course of numerous days!5) Nail pallet wood onto walls. This was work Janelle and I did, but she did most of the nailing, I did all of the cutting. This was fun! I was in a good mood. We mostly reused nails from the pallets and used reclaimed nails and screws from my collection for the rest. Steps 5 and 6 were done more or less in tandem, as wood would be nailed partway up, then the cavity packed, then more wood nailed on until the last course of wood was screwed on after the cavity had been packed full to the top. Screws were used to allow the cavities to be accessed for refilling later if settling becomes an issue.
6) Fill wall cavities between studs with sawdust and joiner/planer shavings to created insulated walls. Janelle mostly did this, which she enjoyed. I'd been stockpiling material for years with this idea in mind. Often sawdust seems a fine compost ingredient or mulch for certain plants, but in many shops (including ours) clean wood shavings and dust are mixed with small amounts of plastics, composite wood waste, pressure treated material, etc., and ought not to be used that way. Also, if Black Walnut makes up a substantial portion of the material, it may be toxic to some plants. I hate to landfill usable stuff; if I can think of a use for it I often hang onto it. But I also try to be pretty scrupulous about what goes in or on the soil. The resulting heaps of bagged dust and shavings are visible in the foreground of our "before" photos below. We ran out before finishing, and gratefully went to a friend/neighbor's house and shoveled up a trailer load of sawdust from their nursery bed supply to finish out. Thanks Jonathan and Christen!! Another cleaning was needed at the end of this job!
7) Sort and organize the piles in the garage and common room and restock/arrange shed with shop tools, fasteners, and materials. This was the hard part and mostly all me except for some help with carrying, a screw-sorting project by my fine daughters, and a marathon nail-sorting session by Janelle's Mom.I found much of the sorting work--which was where the lion's share of my time went--frustrating, irritating, unpleasant, vexing, and boring. At times I felt humiliated, anxious, sad, distracted, and confused. I felt trapped into the work, knowing it needed to be done and no one could really do most of it but me. I felt spring pushing out into the waking buds and shoots and could feel us falling behind. I knew all along it would be worth it.
This is the kind of thing that gets me distinctly in touch with a grief process. I think the grief is two-fold: I realize what a wasteful society I am a member of, because I know I hang onto all this stuff in the knowledge that despite much of it having usefulness and potential, I am one of the few people I know who will take trouble to make use of it. Handling it all and making decisions about it makes this literally palpable. It also can make me feel like sort of a weirdo (normal people don't waste their time with this junk). The other grief is associated with visions of my life, my sense of self, and the passage of time. Handling a whimsical or intriguing item I stashed away years ago thinking I might like to do something with it sometime brings home to me that I haven't done that project, in some cases that I might never use that thing after all--my mortal life will not include the implementing of that idea--and anyway there will never be time enough in all my life to do all the things I have thought I might like to. 'See?', the piles say to me, 'You can't do what you thought you could, and maybe you don't really want to anymore. You've got limits. You've changed.'
Whew! Who knew all that could be wrapped into a bunch of shop detritus? I did, and that's why I dreaded it. But look! Look what's to be gained: A shop space that is more attractive, useful, and comfortable. A space that can welcome the enacting of those ideas that I (and others) do find the time and wherewithal to endeavor (see below). Now let's see if I can keep it that way.
8) The project finished, just yesterday (almost two weeks from the start) with a trip to the Mercy House building materials thrift store, which opened within the last few years and has filled a welcome function in the community while raising money to fund care for families contending with housing insecurity in our area. In many cases, items I had squirreled away years ago, before the opening of the store, now had a place to go besides the landfill and which makes them available to people who like or need to use waste/discounted items. I took my supply there at the end of the job with some trepidation; I didn't want to burden them with my junk. I purposely stocked the trailer with landfill items first, donations on top so if they didn't want something I could just take it on to its final home. As it turns out, they LOVED the stuff I brought, declaring it great and me awesome. Maybe I feel like a weirdo because I'm hanging out with the wrong people!In conclusion, here's some fun before and after visuals!
Oh, not to forget 9) DANCE PARTY!
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