In a new attempt to bring order to the chaotic spatter of stuff that is strewn throughout the house, my wife recently purchased a lifetime supply of medium-sized plastic containers with lids. They now occupy one wall of the basement, awaiting a permanent position in the storage room I made down there a few months ago. I somewhat wonder if this is a defeat, since I had planned to make enough storage for whatever was worth keeping and then simply throw away the surplus. Instead, a large number of supposedly useful things have been idling away on the basement floor.

I did plan on making shelves in the storage room that would run from wall to wall and floor to ceiling but I became satisfied reusing some clunky black plastic shelves that were already down there. Thick black plastic takes up quite a bit of space on its own, and the shelves are not really high enough to hold useful-sized boxes. In fact, the new plastic containers (which were remarkably cheap) won’t fit on the plastic shelves at all. A different arrangement will be needed.
My wife wanted me to make a bookcase. She asked me last week. We have a lot of books that need a place to stay and I agree there is not enough shelf space. I made two fairly large bookcases a few years ago and was quite pleased with myself about that. But those are full and there are still more books and since I refuse to give them away, she asked me to make a bookcase.

“I would need to go buy wood for that.”

“What about all that wood in the workshop?”

I know the idea there. The idea is that I have all that wood and it can be used to make things. Well, that’s somewhat true. But I can’t make just anything out of my hoard of various boards. A bookcase requires wood that isn’t here. Because it would be a new project. And new projects require wood that isn’t here.
Or perhaps there’s a better way to state it. All of my wood is on the woodracks that line one wall of my workshop. While there might be enough of a particular kind of stock to make a bookcase, that would require digging through the stacks to find enough pieces. Frankly, I’ve been a little afraid of the woodrack for a couple of years, because I am almost completely certain that any attempt to remove a piece will send everything toppling down onto me like a sadistic giant Jenga tower.

That is an instance where I made something with too much storage capacity. There were a number of roughly assembled storage contraptions in the basement when I moved in. I have no better name for them, since they were not really functional, they were ugly and overly big, and they followed no design. they were made from 2x3s and pine boards and looked like oversized versions of failed high school woodshop creations. Anyway, I dismantled those things and ended up with a lot of wood.
I already had a lot of wood, of course, and I needed a place to put it. So, I used the newly extracted 2x3s to make racks. I stacked the pine boards on it (they would likely be suitable for making a shelf) and then I stacked the rest of my wood on it. I thought at the time that I was organizing. I’m not sure I know what the word means.
Anyway, I will solve the bookcase situation by eventually making something or other. But the books can be moved into the plastic containers. And the plastic containers can be shuffled into the storage room. That will require shuffling out a big shelf that’s taking up too much space in the storage room. That shelf, in turn, can find a new home along some wall where it cannot get any books put on it, because all the books will be in plastic containers.

And, the next time I am looking for a copy of The Big Sleep, I will stare in fear at the newly erected giant Jenga tower of plastic containers and probably go buy a copy at a book store.