[Woodworkers] We Don't Go Under The Stairs Anymore

[Joe Johns via Woodworkers]

It's a well-known and documented fact that every household in the free
world has a junk drawer.  Ohh, don't you sit there shaking your head!  You
might know it by a different name, but I know you have one.

The only people who don't have *junk drawers* are the villagers who live in
mud huts in Africa.  What they have are junk niches.  See, what they do is,
when they build their hut they have to wait until it dries really, really
good in the hot African sunlight.  Then, they go inside, take a sharp stick
and carve out niches in the walls of the hut.  One of them gets to be their
junk niche.

I know it's hard to believe but it's true.  Being a woodworker I know it's
damn near impossible to get a drawer front to properly fit a dome shaped
mud hut.  Besides, if some woodworking genius other than myself could do so
then pretty much all of the drawer would be sticking outside the wall of
the hut.  This would allow other villagers to walk by and steal their
junk.  Therefore, that is why they have inside niches.

I've obviously cleared that up so I shall move on.

It's the same thing with the civilized world - you move into a house, you
walk into the kitchen and without so much as a fleeting thought, you
instantly pick a drawer that will forevermore be known as the j*unk drawer*.
Ya know what?  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say unless you're moving into
a brand new home that the drawer you picked was the exact same drawer
picked by the person living there before you.

Just because I said 'every household in the free world...' doesn't mean I
agree with it.  My household is the sole exception to my earlier
declaration.

See, I think a *junk drawer* is an indication of slothfulness.  Indeed, the
indolent nature and desire of someone having something in their hand and,
for want of an intelligent decision on where it should really be placed, it
gets thrown into the *junk drawer*.  Scissors, nail clippers, Scotch tape
dispensers, balloons and snapped birthday candles, one shoelace, a couple
batteries (none of them are the same size and both are dead) - the list is
endless and the drawer brimming.

In fact, I'm willing to bet when people move out of a house that they have
a box labelled "Junk Drawer".  I mean, think about it, it's a whole lot
easier to dump the drawer's contents into a box than to sort through it,
right?  So, when they get to the new place and the instant decision on
which drawer will be their new *junk drawer* has been made, they dump in
the whole box; think of it as being the proliferation of pestilence.

Here's a vivid picture for ya...

You come home from a long day of working for the man, you crawl into the
house on your hands and knees and onward to the living room where you claw
up onto the couch and, with the little strength you have left, you pick up
the TV remote and it doesn't work.  The screen says, "Hey, Dummy!  I told
you to replace the batteries two weeks ago!".  Meanwhile, your wife is
upstairs sorting out the remaining fifty-six moving boxes; each of them
labelled, "Clothes I outgrew 5 years ago".

You yell at the ceiling, "Honnnneeey, where are the batteries?"

She yells at the floor, "In the kitchen, in the junk drawer."

"Awww, shit,"  You say with great trepidation, "I'd have better luck
finding them on the Moon, I'll be in there for hours."

That's why I don't have a junk drawer.

What I do have is a junk pit - it's under the stairs.  It's that dank,
dark, dismal and almost useless space created when you have stairs leading
to another floor that morphed into a planetary black hole and sucks up
everything coming near it.

Here, I'll help you out...imagine an indoor landfill.

A couple months ago I was forced to go into the landfill to look for a
windshield cleaning thingy - ya know, the ones you see at filling stations
with the handle sticking out of a bucket of water and has a sponge on one
side and a rubber squeegee on the other?  I knew I had one and after
extensive searching elsewhere and not finding it, I reasoned it had to be
under the stairs.

Holy crud, it was like Fibber McGee's closet!  Ice skates from the 50's,
picture frames with people nobody in the house knew, old boxes of laundry
soap, broom and mop handles, old toasters and other kitchen gadgets, you
name it and it was under there.  One of the things I found was a brush; a
most odd and strangely shaped brush.  I held it in my hands and studied it
really, really long and hard.  The more I looked at it, the more I was left
puzzled.  The end was much smaller in diameter than the rest leading me to
suspect it was meant to be easily inserted into something but I had no idea
what that something was.  I took it to the shop and set it on the back
counter and left it there figuring I could at least cut off and use the
wooden dowel handle and maybe the brush in some future capacity.

Fast forward to yesterday, I'm in the shop, the outside temperature was 24°
and the inside a balmy 45°.  Now, I don't know about you but I didn't
clamber to the top of the food chain to work in temperatures I can't
control; it was time to fire up the wood stove and while it gained
intensity I walked to the other end of the shop to lay some things down on
the workbench.  That was when I seen the brush - ohh, I had seen it many
times since placing it there those couple months back but I had never
really *SEEN* it for what I could do with it on this day.

I left skid marks racing home to print out a certificate then ripped back
to the shop, made a frame, cut the glass - I was on a very important
mission, a mission that couldn't wait.  At one point I shook my fists and
hollered at the ceiling, "This is my quest!  This is my destiny!  People
coming into the Twisted Knot Woodshop absolutely need to see this!"



​

-- 
Joe,
The Twisted Knot Woodshop, "There's never been a classier joint"
Visit the Twisted Knot Woodshop - http://www.twistedknotwoodshop.com
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