For the first little bit of this year, I’ve got a small goal of organizing and cleaning up. The biggest problem I have right now is wood storage. The first thing I did to address that might seem a little counter-intuitive: I built a project, the “Kitchissippi” chair that Lee Valley sells the plans for:

(I haven’t rounded over the edges or painted the thing yet, but that can wait for somewhat warmer weather anyway.) So the shop was a bit of a mess while I was working on it, but the goal was to use up a stack of cedar that had laying around. This worked; it turns out that having less wood in storage makes it easier to organize. And because it was built to a plan and I didn’t have to think about much other than where I’d be making the cuts from, it didn’t take the usual 27 years that it normally takes me to complete something.

Then, over the last week, I’ve been making some sort of effort to clean up the place for Chinese New Year (新年快樂, y’all). Maybe it sounds like a good idea at the time, I dunno. I cleared shelves, reorganized lots of stuff, and streamlined my scrap/offcut piles. There will be no cleaning tomorrow.

Above all, I’ve been making plans. I’m not done with this cleanup task. For the next stage, I’ll be making a few more projects. Some are for the shop, including one to finally end my planes-under-the-bench problem. Others are for the house, where (I think) I have the wood necessary to make a project or two.