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

Sun Oct 25 09:29:55 PDT 2015

So, Joe, did it work for ya? Or do you still have a junk closet under the
stairs? We don't want to know if you used the lube...

We don't have a junk drawer, oddly enough. We do have a drawer that holds
kitchen appliance manuals, batteries in a Ziploc bag to be recycled, and
stamps and envelopes. My wife cleared out all the junk and won't let me put
random things in there anymore. :-)

-Steve
On Oct 25, 2015 8:31 AM, "Joe Johns via Woodworkers" <
woodworkers at lists.sawdusters.org> wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Have you ever wondered how the rock, paper and scissors settle an argument?
> Woodworkers at lists.sawdusters.org
>
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