Question: How often do you clean the train room and work area/bench and just end up doing what I do, moving everything from one place to another. Why is it that we need everything. I got the court ordered (wife) clean the room and it took all day and I moved the same crap around. HELP!
I do that every day, if you only count today. Every other day if you count yesterday. Usually it takes company or the end of a major project to get a clean up. Today I was too lazy to do anything else. At the end of a project I do try to throw stuff away, I can’t find it later anyway if I keep it. I am interested in how the wife even knows what it looks like, my wife never looks in the train room. I don’t check her music room either.
I,m kinda with Art, cleanup after a major project.Most of the time I clean when I can’t get going,lack initiative,or like Art said just plain lazy. This gives me time to think about what comes next and may or may not pay off in a spate of creativity.
I clean up at odd intervals, cleaning today for a reason. Although I have good painted floors, today I’m tiling the floor of my train room. Needed to move all sorts of thing to do that.
I start to clean the work area whenever I can’t find the tools or other material I need for a project. My enthusiasm wanes and my anger grows exponentially when I need a tool or part and can’t find it.
I clean my train room about once a month which involves vacuuming the carpet and dusting. One of these days I’m going to have to remove all of the structures and so forth from my layout and give it a careful dusting and cleaning…
Tracklayer
My train table stays pretty clean. Now… my weathering table is a MESS!!! I have paints, powders, wheels, couplers, etc all over the place. I try to clean it everytime I do a weather job. Doesn’t happen that way thou.
I am kinda with TrackLayer, Seems like once a month or so I get the bug and go out there to really straighten up and clean. For me, I got a whole garage to work with so itsa big room. I have a bad habit of taking glasses out there, but forgetting them. Imagine…
As far the work bench goes… it depends on how often I am useing it or how mnay projects I am working on. All though, I admit, before I start a project, I always get it clean. Its like my shop where I work, I hate loseing time looking for something, or haveing stuff in my way when I need room.
Reference Paragraph 1 - I resemble that, although the thing that usually gets left behind is my coffee spoon…[:-^]
In between the monthly deck sweepings, if I notice that the spot where I’m working has accumulated an excess of grunge (saw/drill dust, foam plastic shavings, odd bits of steel from working with steel studs) I’ll spend five minutes with a foxtail and scoop (dustpan and brush to you landlubbers) and get down to bare floor over an area of a couple of square yards.
My work surfaces stay pretty clean, mostly because they get stored on edge when not in immediate use. Likewise, I’m pretty good at returning tools to their proper places at the end of a work session. [It’s the middle of the work session, “Now where did I put that [censored] (fill in tool or construction material of choice,)” incidents that sometimes raise my blood pressure.] Part of that is my previous existence as a flight line mechanic.
I do my tracklaying and wiring with a work train in the immediate vicinity, so clipped rail ends (too short to use otherwise,) wire insulation, cut off ties and such are placed in the scrap car immediately, then emptied into the trash bag (hung off the end of a joist under the yard) when the train is returned to its termi
I try and give it a good cleaning once a month to keep the dust down. I have a bad habit of not putting tools and stuff away when I’m done with them.
[#ditto] and it seems to make a mountain at the end of the month!!!
Brian
Hi Tracklayer,
You mentioned above that you remove the structures for dusting. I bought the attachment in this link from Micro-Mark. http://www.ares-server.com/Ares/Ares.asp?MerchantID=RET01229&Action=Catalog&Type=Product&ID=81064 My layout is 18’ by 16’ and I vacuumed all the streets and buildings in about an hour using this attachment which hooks up to my vacuum cleaner.
Hope this helps.
Mondo
Toro Electric Super Leaf Blower (Model #51591).
Oh…and be sure all your little detail parts and people are glued down gooood…
It took me a while, but, I finaly it out that when a wife says clean, about all that I need to do is organize it, then hit the area with a vacume is all that is needed, to make the wife think that I actualy put forth some effort for her [angel], when in reality I realy didn’t do much more than shift things around [:-,].
We vacuum the basement about once every two weeks…not a lot of traffic except for the laundry and me at the computer or layout. When I vacuum, I tidy up all the bits of 600 grit sandpaper, the bits of strip wood, the plastic ties, files, pliers, half-used bags of ground foam and cinders, burnt paper towel used to wipe the carbon of the soldering iron, tidy up the cords to the Dremel and soldering iron, and so on. I vacuum the rug thoroughly, and can then begin the enjoyable process of rendering it completely disorganized and messy over the next few days.
Let’s not go into my work bench space…okay?
What else would cleaning be besides re-organization?
A book on the bookshelf is clean.
A collapsed stack of books on the sofa, well, maybe not.
Pulverized sand and organic material, commonly referred to as ‘dirt’ is perfectly well at home in the backyard, but not necessarily so, lining the kitchen sink.
Bacteria are at home in septic systems and the large intestine, where they are critical for proper systems operation. Bacteria on your dinner fork may not qualify as beneficial in the same degree.
Dirt is nothing more than matter that’s in the wrong place.
Cleaning up is simply putting the matter where it belongs.
If you and Her Honor disagree where certain item’s proper places are, discussion and probably compromise are in order.
If you find yourself cronically re-organizing certain classes of matter, a hard look at your organizational systems, and a trip down the Tupperware and closet shelving aisles at the local Wal-mart may save you a significant amount of time, regularly, for the rest of your life.
If something doesn’t HAVE a proper place, or if its designated location does not square well with that item’s purpose, and integrate well with the rest of your priorities, then it needs to find a new home, within your domicile or not, as the case may be.
You wouldn’t believe what some people consider to be clean. I know of one guy that pressure washes his garage, driveway, truck, and motorcycles 2-3 times a week - more if it rains. I know another guy that believes that if you can’t perform major surgery, on the surface, it’s not clean enough, and his wife is worse.
Wally World sells a similar attachment kit in their shop vac section.
Me its beer bottles, lol. I usually clean the layout area up about once a month.
Ohhh YES I would.
The kid’s mom is the queen of “sterile”, and that’s one of the big reasons I sixed her.
Right now, my living room, adjacent to the dining room’s train layout, has:
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On one couch, all the stuff that was on the 2x4 layout extension before I started laying track Saturday,
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On the other couch, all the track I haven’t laid yet, plus turnouts,
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Every scrap piece of wood I own, (except the big timbers, which always stay outside) leaning against one wall,
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On the coffee table, all the tools I used to build the benchwork last week, cordless, extra batteries, bits, drivers, screws, tape measure, framing square, two levels…
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In front of the entertainment center, my Highpower cart and a keyboard stand, that used to rest under the layout,
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Out in the middle of the room, three computer mice, and one 15 inch monitor that worked just fine the last time it was in service, but since then failed and didn’t bother to tell me till it was hooked up on the new sound system shelf under the layout,
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The shopvac,
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Two unopened boxes containing two 3’ x 6’ x '1 foot shelving units for the master bedroom, because soon, I’m going to have to re-introduce sterility to the living room the kids are due to visit Friday, and all that stuff has to go somewhere,
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And finally, the seven foot photo tripod I used to take pictures of the new benchwork, and wil