Getting Organized

I like things I work with to be organized.  Not OCD type organization just organized so I can find things.  Sometimes that can be a problem if you don’t have the tools you normally use to organize with.  For example my “desk” is a bit of mess because I have nothing to put files in.  So they sit on top of my desk along with my books and constantly get knocked askew as I flip through them to file receipts which seems to be a major time consumer for me.  First I have to do the accounting then I have to take pictures of receipts for the folks in the states and rename the picture files once I get them on my computer so they can easily figure out what they are for then I get to file them in their folder.  I also have to keep account of all the money I spend personally for tax purposes since I have to show the money I got was what it took to live here.

So the tool room has been a big headache for me.  First it is the old min-shop room and the shelving was kind of haphazardly built.  So I recently decided to tackle this room and get everything properly organized so I was not tripping over items to hunt for the tool I wanted to work with.

As always with these type of things, I started by removing everything from the tool room which worried Isayah the groundskeeper quite a bit.  I guess he thought I would be like most folks in authority and leave it there for him to deal with later.  One of these days he is going to learn I am not like that.

Something else most people know about me is that I like to reuse items that are otherwise going to be trash for something useful.  One of the things piling up are my 1.5 liter water bottles.  The Coke Zero bottles have a purpose once I have enough of them so I am not worried about them.  I remembered a DIY article about using old wine bottles to be the vertical supports in shelving.  Basically they drill a hole large enough to slide the board over the neck of the wine bottle and then it stops before it gets to the body.  The key I remember was that the bottles for one shelf had to have the same dimensions neck to body or it would not be level which would introduce new stresses on the bottles that would not be good.  That would not be a problem as all my water bottles were the exact same type.

The first problem came when I could not find a drill bit in town large enough to get the spout part of the bottle into.  In fact the largest I could find was ¼” which was not even close.  The next time I am in Arusha I am sure I can find some but that does not help me now.  So I decide to at least test the load limits of the bottle just balancing the shelf on them.  Actually I screwed the bottle cap to the board to keep it from slipping.  The first attempt would be with four empty bottles, a 1x10 board cut 4 feet long.  This attempt held 6 full paint cans and one of the bottles collapsed with the addition of a 7^th.

The next attempt would be with the bottles full of sand.   This will add structural integrity by pushing out on the walls of the water bottle while the weight from tends to cause the weak spots in the bottle to collapse into the bottle.  I could have used water but between it being a vital resource and the fact it would grow algae I did not it was a good choice.  I left the bottle caps screwed to the board.  This time I got 10 full paint cans (all I had to test with at the moment) on the board and the bottles were still holding.  It was important to determine how much weight something like this can hold for determining how many shelves you stack on top of each other.

Another good reason to fill the water bottles is due to pressure changes based on temperature.  For example place a small amount of warm water in an empty water bottle and allow it to increase the temperature of the entire bottle.  Then with the cap sealed tight, place it in a freezer for a couple of minutes. When you take it out it should have collapsed on itself due to the vacuum created as the air inside the bottle went from warm to cold and no way to equalize the pressure difference.  That can and has happened on a small scale over night with some of my water bottles.  Normally they are squished and the cap is a lot harder to get off.  All the same that small amount could cause the shelving to fail.  This would not be a problem with wine bottles because the pressure change in a house would not be enough to crush the glass.  The best way to avoid this is to either fill with sand to prevent the collapse or remove the cap so that there is a way to equalize the pressure.  I needed the caps on in my test so I went with sand.  Besides now one of them is a great door stop.

Something else I have a lot of is empty paint cans.  For some reason it costs more to get a large container of paint than the equivalent amount in smaller cans.  (cans are 4 liters and a large is 20 liters-one can cost 20,000 TSH but a 20 liter or (4liters * 5 cans) is 140,000 TSH which is more than what the 5 cans of 4 liters would cost).  So end result is I have a lot of empty paint cans and we were planning on using them for William’s proposed tree nursery but since I have not actually gotten a proposal on that, I decided to use them for shelving.  They are not the most attractive things even if I remove the labels since most have dents and they take up a fair amount of the shelving space, but they can hold a lot of weight.  One shelf I made with a 2x6 about 8 feet long with 2 paint cans stacked on each end now holds all the paint we had and have just purchased for another project (18 full cans and another 5 with some amount in them).

So I used the paint cans to make a couple of sets of shelves then went through some of the various items we had in wood and reinforced some of the existing shelving to be a little bit stronger.  I took some of the left over guttering and pipes and used twine to create some slings to put store them off the ceiling.  A second problem of using the mini-shop is the size of the room prevents me from storing our large ladders, full lengths of wood or pipe and the wheelbarrow inside.

Over the next day and a half I inspected every tool as created a place for it in the new system.  I inventoried all items remaining.  I also packed up and moved to the trash pile a lot of items that keep showing up in the room that are broken, or never really had a good use.  Now we have all our nails and screws in labeled jars instead of the paper boxes they are sold in.  Not heavy cardboard like they are in the US but paper boxes that fall apart unless you pick them up with our hand on the bottom.  All the paint is now organized by type and color with the partials on top and the full ones on bottom.  We have an electric and plumbing section as well as Steve’s personal tools. These are the ones I brought over from my shop in the states.  After cleaning everything for about the 5^th time and spraying the bats that were causing the mess again, I went to labeling sections, tools like I had done with the nails and screws.  Each item is labeled in English and Swahili.  I did this as a practice for me to learn the Swahili but also so Isayah can try to learn some of the English if he wants to.

I even found a way to reuse the packaging from the wonderful tie-down straps the Gordons donated and sent over with William recently.  The plastic case now keeps my screwdrivers in one location and easy to see.

After I did that I added the electrical lights to the Ward building showers to fill out my 2^nd day.