One thing I didn’t do at the end of last year’s busy building season was sort out all my scrounged fasteners. In fact until last week’s scramble to find enough bolts to assemble the new metallic target stand, I hadn’t really given the issue much thought.
And it was a mess. I pulled a lot of nails and unscrewed a lot of screws last year, some got re-used and some did not, and they all got tossed into cans willy-nilly, the junk taking up space with the useful. If I’d found a can hiding eight or ten 3/8″ bolts of the perfect length with nuts and washers that would have let me finish the paper target stand, I might have cried. Fortunately or unfortunately that did not happen.
But now things are back under control. Because of all the scrounging and construction around here, picking up screws and nails with tires is a real issue. So among other issues – like going over work areas with a drag magnet – I try to be careful about how I dispose of non-reusable fasteners. In this case I disposed of about 1.5 #10 cans worth – covered, wrapped in duct tape and carefully placed in the bottom of a garbage can to be covered with bagged kitchen garbage in the fullness of time, then transported to the county dump. All the rest is sorted and stored – I even put up a new screw shelf in the powershed to make things easier to find than they were last year.
With my other hand, I played Domestic Joel on this quiet Sunday…
…and now I’m going to pop a beer and read a book.
Guy can’t have too many “wonder buckets”. The trick is to keep them sorted to like fasteners together. I try, gawd knows I try, but I always get impatient at “putting away time” and toss the wood screws in with the hex-head bolts, and like that.