Last week Jay took vacation time from work and spent it playing in his workshop. Not making any projects, but actually trying to clean and organize it. If you have any kind of a hobby area you know how quickly it can get messy and disorganized when you have multiple projects going on at one time.

It was the smaller workshop that he wanted to clean and organize. These shelves came with the house when we bought it, and they were so big that they weren’t able to be used efficiently. The first part of the week was spent cleaning them off, adding some shelves, and purchasing more totes for organizing the bits and bobs.

All of this stuff was either on the shelves or in front of them.

More bits and bobs…

And a bit of Bob 🙂

After working on it all week it was finally organized:

He even managed to clean the side workbench:

This was looking really good. There was only one problem…

… there are now airplanes all over the basement. *sigh*

This is what happens when your hobbies take up a lot of room. The airplanes used to have their own space:

Jay started getting more into woodworking, so now this is what takes up this space:

When we improved the shed, we thought we might be able to fit a few planes in there.

HA! We were so silly and naive (at least, I was!).

Our goal is to eventually buy a piece of property large enough so that Jay can fly his planes any time he wants in his own back yard. Thus, he doesn’t want to sell all of them (he’s willing to let a few go for the right price), but in the meantime… what do we do with the airplanes? The spare bed can’t hold many more.

The other day I was thinking about the lack of airplane storage and how to get my finishing table (and spare bed) back. Then I headed outside to go to church, which sent my thoughts spiraling into the fact that the weather is almost nice enough for me to get out in the yard. Which brought to mind a trouble spot in the yard (this is one of my straighter paths of thought… some of them are VERY twisty). This is the big problem spot:

We’ve lived here for six years and have only used this area to collect junk. It’s off of the deck, but not at all useful. I either have to pick the weeds each summer or Jay mows them down, which is difficult because this area is filled with little white landscaping rocks. It’s a narrow, but long, area. Then it hit me… Jay could build a little lean-to style building for storing his airplanes. It can’t be very tall because it can’t cover the window on that side of the house, but it would be better than what we are currently doing. We had even discussed possibly renting a storage unit until we saw the monthly price!

When I mentioned an Airplane Lean-To to Jay he pulled out a measuring tape, made a few measurements, and then got on the computer to draw out a structure on SketchUp. We will have to make it mobile because it’s so tight in there it can’t be built in place. Also, when we move I told Jay we could just have it pulled up on a flat bed so that all of his airplanes can be moved at once. So, we’ll see how that project progresses this year, but at least we have a plan!