Sometimes the little things are big things.

Overall, I really don't think I'm that hard of a person to please.

Now I freely admit that I tend to be a rather picky eater (Diane would argue my modification of picky with rather, but it's my blog so I'm keeping it as a rather picky eater.)

Okay, I also tend to be slightly OCD about my shirts being starched a certain way and always wearing shoes when I am awake and maybe just a touch of OCD tendencies appear in my insistence to have structure in EVERYTHING in my life.

Other than that, though, I'm really not a hard person to please.

Really.

One of my pet peeves (I only have about 3,000 of them) has to do with my tools being where they belong so I can find them the next time I need to use them. Through the couple of decades that we have lived in our home, the basement and garage became a catch all - causing virtually every attempt to find a particular tool to be an exercise in futility and frustration.

Maybe that's just a little thing to most people; but, to me, it was a very big thing.

I got the bug last fall to tackle the garage and basement so I could (once and for all) get things organized so we could find needed items without having to set a GPS waypoint to find our way back from the jungle the storage areas had become. Thus started a carefully choreographed process of organizing and cleaning. I started on the garage one Saturday morning; moving everything from the garage onto the driveway. I assembled some shelves and started the process of bringing things in and putting them away.

This could only go so far, of course, because there were some items in the garage that had to go to the basement; which wasn't ready to receive anything, yet. We got the garage to a semi-finished state so I could turn my attention to the basement. This created another conundrum because I could only get so far with the cleaning and organization down there before coming up with a way to get rid of some stuff.

After much hemming and hawing about how to handle some stuff, we finally got the basement cleaned and installed more shelving down there to allow me to shift my focus to my ultimate goal of getting my workbench cleaned off and organized once and for all. This finally became possible because Joseph, Matthew and Shelley got together and gave me thirty-two beautiful square feet of pegboard, a whole collection of hooks and tool holders in various sizes and a Menard's gift card that I can use to add more goodies to the collection! It's much easier to know what I need when I can see what I have.

I spent a couple of evenings last week running wires and moving light fixtures around to better light up the basement.

Then came Saturday...

Matthew and I hung the furring strips on the concrete wall and fastened the pegboard.

Then I got started on figuring out just where I want to hang all of my tools. I'm sure the configuration will change at least a couple of times before I settle on a final layout, but at least it's a start! I have printed out labels for all of my tools that I will affix to the pegboard where each tool is to hang once I settle on a final configuration. That will make it very easy to determine what is missing when a tool is "borrowed" and not returned to its proper place. It will also make it very easy for whomever "borrowed" the tool to make sure it gets back into the correct place when they finish using it and are diligent about returning it to its proper place.

The next step is moving my table saw down there to complete the workshop.

It may seem like a little thing to you that my tools are now organized, but to me, it is a very, very big thing.

You see; sometimes the little things are big things...