City Beat: Renovation another word for moving piles

Over the years, we've owned two houses, and in that time I've had the opportunity to do all manner of renovation and remodeling, or as we like to call it, "moving piles."

Whether the work has been in a bathroom, a kitchen, a basement or on the front porch, the majority of actual work is spent moving stuff from one side of the room or house to another so that I can get to the space that needs the actual painting, sanding, hammering or whatever.

Like George Carlin, all I really want is a place for my stuff.

This moving-piles exercise that we do is very fluid and very cyclical. Every single time that we find a place for the stuff and get a room relatively put together, it's time to begin a new project, which means the put-together space becomes temporary storage space.

I have a neighbor who partially solved this dilemma by buying not only a tow-behind trailer, but one of those big trucks with side panels like the bread delivery guys drive. He also stored some of his stuff in a formerly empty building. When that was sold recently, he had the unenviable task of moving a lot of large piles of stuff.

This is an important, but entirely frustrating, exercise. It's important because in so doing you always find something you thought was lost or had forgotten about. And, for about 10 minutes, you have things organized. Or so it would seem.

I've never in my life been able to actually have everything organized. When the last child went away to school, I had high hopes of converting one of the bedrooms into an office/media room. Here I had big plans for taking all of the old home movies and converting them to digital. It would also become home to all of the wires, cables, plugs, etc. I've collected. I spent hours mentally laying everything out and hours more actually setting everything up.

In some ways, I'm happy with the media setup. But, by the end of the first week, my dream office was suddenly also home to an exercise machine/clothes rack and boxes of stuff that neither my daughter nor son wanted to take with them because it would clutter their new living spaces.

The easy solution would be to put a Dumpster in the driveway and toss everything, but I like having the stuff because I inevitably do use it. I went to help another friend with a small reno project recently, and we needed a 12-inch piece of scrap wood. He didn't have one. In fact, he had almost no scrap. I didn't know whether to envy him or pity him.

Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.

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