My Tractor Completes Me

I had quite a day yesterday.

The people who built my house did a wonderful job in many respects, but they did some weird things, too. For example, their landscaping choices were not good at all. They also made some mistakes with the workshop, which they called “the barn.” They didn’t wire it up with much amperage, and they put a gigantic set of shelves in one corner.

The shelves are four-by-eight sheets of plywood, and there are four of them. That tells you how big and obnoxious the whole structure is. They put the long side against one wall, about three feet from a corner. That was not wise.

There were actually only three plywood sheets in place when I got started yesterday. I will explain that further down.

When you make shelves too deep, you waste a lot of their area. No one is going to reach 4 feet into a shelf to get something. Everything on a shelf that size will be piled up in the first three feet. You end up losing at least half of the storage space you thought you were creating. Things get lost back there. You find yourself doing without things instead of digging for them. It gets dirty in the back because cleaning is nearly impossible.

You should never put deep shelves against a wall. You might as well fill half of the area with concrete blocks. You will have no access to the back of the shelves. If you absolutely have to have deep shelves, you should put them out where a person can walk around them on three sides.

The shelves were an ergonomic disaster, and they also killed a corner of the garage. The little space between the shelves and the corner was so small, it was not useful.

Yesterday, I got fed up. I was either going to cut the shelves in half or turn the whole thing sideways.

I removed nearly all of the junk from the shelves. I moved the giant pile of random things that sat in front of them. I also removed maybe 200 pounds of junk lumber the seller left behind in place of the third shelf. This stuff is probably worth $150 new, but it’s not worth ruining a workshop just to keep it. I put it in a pile behind the shop, and I plan to burn most of it.

I’ll post photos in chronological order. It’s too bad I didn’t take one before I removed the junk that was around the shelves. They were buried.

Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and throw things out. I’m throwing out several rods of rebar, a bunch of lumber, and 5 new steel fence posts. Goodbye! I don’t care what it’s worth. It has to go. I can afford a new two-by-eight if I really need one.

What a mistake it was to keep this junk.

There was also a bunch of 5-gallon paint pails under the shelves, labeled for future use. The colors matched the interior of the house. Call me crazy, but I plan to paint some wood samples with the paint and then throw the pails out. I don’t need the paint. All I will ever need is something the paint people can use to match the colors. A little piece of wood in each color will do fine, and I will be able to put all of them in a drawer.

I looked things over and realized that cutting the shelves in half would mean dismantling the shelves in their entirety. That wasn’t a job I looked forward to. I decided against it.

I could not move them. I guess the whole thing weighs 300 pounds, and it’s flexible, so if you get one leg to move, the ones on the other end bend and dig into the concrete.

I had to think about it for a long time. I could tear them apart and start over. But then there was…the tractor.

I measured, and my tractor’s forks were long enough to go under the shelves. Done deal.

I removed the steel strap that attached the shelves to the wall, cleared a path for the tractor, went it, picked the shelves up, and maneuvered them nearly into position. I got them as close as I could, and then I was stumped again.

But wait! I have a Harbor Freight lift table. It lifts 500 pounds, and it has casters.

I removed the handle from the table for clearance, and then I shoved it under the shelves. By lifting one end, I was able to prevent the legs from gripping the floor. I shoved the shelves against the wall, right where I wanted them. More or less. It might be better to rearrange the whole garage and put them 12 feet farther down the wall, but forgoing that, I got what I wanted.

I strapped the shelves to the wall in two places, sucked the filth off of them with the shop vac, added a new sheet of plywood for a proper third shelf, and put my junk back in. It was amazing. I thought the shop was overflowing, but when I was done, I had a lot of room on the shelves to spare.

It goes to show that what I always say is right: before you build a new workshop, rearrange your old one.

I put things I will rarely or never use toward the back and top. I made an area for metals. One nice thing about such big shelves is that I can stack a lot of bars, angle iron, plate, and other metal items on them.

I stuck my fuel jugs under the bottom shelf in a nice row in the front. I won’t be tripping on them any more. I put the chainsaws and a gas blower under the bottom shelf on one side.

This is tremendous. It’s like the workshop just grew 200 square feet.

I had been considering buying a shed just for materials, but I see no point in it now.

Watching the shop open up as I stored things was a beautiful experience. Every time I put some annoying object in its place, it was as if I felt fresh air entering my lungs.

Because of my oak problem, leaves blow into the shop all the time. The area near the shelves was packed with them. To get at them, I would have had to crawl on my stomach with the shop vac. That was never a possibility. Now I can see the floor again. Magnificent.

There is nothing like a tractor. If you’re a man, a tractor is your best friend. Seems like there’s nothing a tractor can’t do.

Now I have four and a half feet of new wall space, and I can hang yard tools there.

I need to get to work on making more things mobile. There is no excuse for not doing it. The invention of the wheel was not something that happened recently.

Today is going very well. I got rid of my bicycle. There is no place to ride around here. It was cluttering the garage, and I needed room for my machine tools. I kept the bike I bought my dad. The one I sold is a road bike, and it was very uncomfortable to ride. The bike he left me is much easier on the anatomy, and it has spiffy red saddlebags. Maybe one day I’ll live in a place where it will be useful.

I also sold my John Deere Model 15 dump cart. This is a cart you pull behind a garden tractor. When I bought my tractors from the guy who sold us the house, he threw the cart in. I thought it was a great thing, but I soon found out it was useless. I had a golf cart and a pickup truck, not to mention a real tractor, so I never used the John Deere cart. It took up room and got in my way.

I don’t like John Deere. The company treats customers like dirt, and they overcharge for everything. The public responds by giving John Deere something resembling worship. They have the same crazy mindset you see in Apple and Snap-On customers. They don’t just like the products. They don’t just defend the price-gouging. They get very angry if you criticize the companies.

With that in mind, I priced the cart at $500 and put ads up referring to it as a collector’s item.

People laughed at me and sent obnoxious comments. “Did you mean $50?” I told them to make me offers.

I finally lowered the price to $350, and then I considered cutting the cart up and making a John Deere pork smoker on wheels. I thought that would be really funny. The steel was very sturdy, the hardware was first-class, and the smoker would have been bomb-proof. It would also be a good way to express my feelings for John Deere.

Someone contacted me. I told him I was thinking of cutting it up because people were not offering me enough to justify selling it. He said he wasn’t scared by the price.

Today he and his wife drove from Tallahassee and gave me $275 for it. I took his first offer. I think the cart is legitimately worth $250 on Ebay, and Ebay prices are higher than prices on other selling sites, so $275 was a fortune as far as I was concerned.

Now it’s gone, and I will never have to deal with it again.

I wonder what the people who thought my price was funny will think when they see that I sold it.

I feel like going out to the shop and just sitting there, enjoying all the empty air around me.