Not much of a day for accomplishment, today

Tried, I did. Got up almost early after a miserably long night of bizarre dreams (running through corridors after half-imaginary creatures can be exhausting), hoping to garner enough energy to fix everything that is wrong in the house, the car, my brain. But it was not to be.

The fuzziness in my brain didn't stop until nearly ten, whereafter it was finally possible to escape from the torpor of the morning and crawl under the car and attempt to wrest a rusty part from underneath - a rusted, decayed old pair of bolts, actually, that were foiling my efforts to repair the pipes which were leaking far too much noise (it wasn't really meant to sound like a race car).



It was nearly two hours later - two hours of lying on my back trying to contort my limbs into such a position to maximize the amount of torque presented by the pair of end-wrenches - that it suddenly occurred to me (these things have a way of alighting in my brain at inopportune times) that the section of pipe on which I was working, could easily be removed from underneath the car by simply pulling it off the rubber mounts. That took about five minutes. After that, removal of the rusty parts was a cinch.



Well, almost.

I got side-tracked a bit by the towbar. Evidently someone installed a tow package on this vehicle, but it was a bit rusty so I wanted to pull it off and get it cleaned up as well, especially since it was right up there with the muffler mounts, which needed a bit of de-rusting. So I started removing the bolts but soon found that they were really tight. Took a lot longer than I had planned.

The best way to deal with a blown schedule and a lot of frustration, is to (1) go for a ride; (2) buy new toys; and (3) take the kids to the pool. So that's what I did. Took the Toyota for a ride (it still rides fine), dragging the boys along with me so they wouldn't just sit at home playing video games, bought some new tools and a set of car ramps I'd been eyeing for a while, then went home and grabbed the rest of the kids and headed for the pool.

That was soothing.

Afterward, while dinner was getting cooked up, I finally got around to the project I'd been meaning to work on all day long: the garage shelves.



Bought a bunch of shelving a month or two ago, thinking it'd be an easy task to put up some brackets on the back wall and have some storage for all this junk in the garage. But Life Happened, and things got in the way, and it took me this long to get back to it. I'd built a little worktable (per Cheryl's most excellent plan) to have against the back wall, where the lawn mower and snow blower could sit, and the shelves were supposed to go above that.

Took me about ten minutes to attach a couple 2x2 boards against the back wall, then attach the brackets against those, then put up a shelf to see what it looked like.

Not bad. The brackets were supposed to work with 12-inch boards, but they stick out a bit. Gonna hafta do something about that.

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PostScript, Sunday

I was going to take a nap Sunday afternoon, but the unfinished Subaru project in the garage was nagging my brain, and I really wanted to do something with the shelves, too.

So I put the exhaust pipes and muffler back on the car, installed the flange to pull the two pieces back together, fired it up to make sure it was properly muffled (it was!), then re-parked the car to get it in position for Monday. Quick to say, but took me an hour or so.

Then it was time to work on the shelves again. The first one was done. Took me another hour or so to get the second shelf up, after realizing I'd need to put another 2x2 behind it to make it stick out far enough. Then Cheryl put all the paint and varnish and sprays and other assorted paraphenalia on the shelves, and we pulled the old workbench over by the new one (their heights don't match, but that'll get fixed next weekend), and it don't look too bad.



The Dream is to get shelving all across the back wall, and some on the side, then put up one or two additional loft sections. It might then be possible to finally have a place for all our Stuff.

Maybe.