Locked-down and Armed: one man’s struggle with entropy (5) – The White Rabbit

I didn’t explain about the three drills…

I’ve written about the new one – a slinky DeWALT with a noise that makes you shiver with DIYlight. The other two are older versions by the same maker.

Buying the new one was prompted by the failure of both my re-chargeable batteries, when I tried to use the drill after a year of idleness… So, technically, I had a spare drill – but I had purchased only one battery with the new device… Two drills, one battery…hmm.

Prior to the destruction of Salty Pete’s old interior (the ‘radio shacks’), I stored my personal protective gear – safety helmet, armoured gloves, eye-protectors, long waders for the pond, etc – in a large plastic box that was loosely jammed on to the main cross-member that supports the upper part of the building. The middle of the former Saltpetre was so cluttered that I needed somewhere with easy access to my most precious life-protecting gear. Being high above, I only had to arrange the pink ladder (more on this later) to access my essential gear.

Before I swung the sledgehammer at the entire left side of the interior, I shimmied up the ladder to retrieve the box before the start of armageddon. The box contained a surprise: all my expected stuff and, underneath, another drill case. It was old and dirty, but inside was a drill and two batteries… presumable dead ones.

In a state of disbelief, I did a quiet calculation on my fingers and realised I now had – at least potentially – three drills and three batteries – assuming the older ones worked.

It was too good to be true. Hardly daring to hope, I stretched a power line up to the only socket in the place and used a multi-plug to connect the two chargers. There was a satisfying clunk as the batteries dropped into the charger’s housing… and then both red lights began to blink, indicating they were charging. Disbelief… and a silent thank you to the fates.

Within a meagre half an hour, they were fully charged, tested and ready for action. Two of the drills were mine; the other was a mystery. Five years ago, we had some structural work done to create an interior loft within the Saltpetre; but no-one had contacted us about a lost drill case and contents.

I made a phone call to check. Nope… said the roofer and builder of lofts. The drill kit was not his…. A mystery; but in these circumstances, a delightful one. If anyone else who’d worked here came to mind, I’d come clean.

If not, I had three drills…each with a battery.

A drill saves hours of work, but what slows you down is having to change the ‘bit’ from, say, a thin pilot drill – used to make sure the final screw doesn’t split the wood, to a bit that functions as a powerful screwdriver – driving a long, high-tensile screw home in a few seconds, where it would have taken long minutes by hand. The small, dedicated ones are useful in a house, but, for serious stuff, get an adaptor for your drill…heaven!

The only reason the ‘long-handled garden tools rack’ had been finished in the short time available was the double-act of two drills, functioning as described, above.

The main problem when working on Salty Pete’s interior was the low level of light- there are no windows. When we bought The Wharf, ten years ago, there was no electric to the ‘shed’. While having the contours of the future garden carved out of the muddy building site, we had an armoured cable routed under what would become the main lawn. For the first few years, we survived off this, and the single plug near the door, barely visiting Salty Pete during the dark months. Eventually, we had a overhead set of sockets and a strip light put in, but the light was in the wrong place – on the side of the lintel and not its lower face, where it would light up the intended (future) workbench, below.

I was going to need a lot of light for some of the work I had planned, so I disconnected the fuse, then the light-fitting, before stretching the existing cable to allow for it to be mounted directly over the central part of the building. The spring days were bright, but that little extra from the overhead helped a lot.

Having relocated the main light, I took stock of what the rest of the day might contain. There was another ‘easy win’ for Square 14: an object that would add both hand-tools and liquid storage beneath the long-handled tools rack. For years it had served as a shelving unit in the larder of our former house. It was made wholly of plastic and I hated it… But it was free.

The plastic shelf was too tall. The top of this unit had to be level with the base of the tools above it. A hand saw made short work of the adjustment in height. Minutes later, minus its top shelf, it was functioning as a container for the petrol, two-stroke, white spirit, turps and various other liquids that normally take up flow-through space on a garage floor.

The new structure was beginning to emerge within the dusty cube of the Saltpetre. Its functions and forms were nascent in what was included and excluded so far. This wall was to be dedicated to garden tools and liquids at one end; and ‘tall power tools’ at the other, with drills taking a central place in the middle. The ‘tall power tools’ had no common home at present and were a damned nuisance. Incorporating them into the wall would free up much of the floor and provide a wonderful feeling of walkable space.

I was starting to realise that this was not just a physical journey, but a psychological one, as well. Much of my personal past was being confronted, here… Contradictions have a habit of being exposed in such a process.

Enter contradiction…

It’s about four feet tall, garish red with grey trim, and had large castor wheels. It’s all plastic, and often bends in all the wrong places. It’s useless and Bernie couldn’t wait to get rid of it!

It’s a tool chest – but was never strong enough to do its job. I used it for years in my office–but not for anything heavy. Since then, it had mouldered at the back of Salty Pete, buried under a mountain of other, unlikely-to-be-reused stuff.

But my ‘gift from above’ drills were sitting, quite nicely, on it. Moreover, it could be rotated into the corner of Square 6, where it would take up the minimum room and not block access to the ‘long power tools’ that had to live on the adjacent and recessed Square 19. Reluctantly, I could see the potential for it to be dedicated solely to the drill-related part of my hardware. And I had just redeemed and re-used Bernie’s nasty plastic shelves. According to the verdict accompanying the last mug of tea, she was ‘well pleased!’

There was a trade, here… And I knew just how to sweeten the deal. On her last mercy mission with the tea, Bernie had remarked that it was a pity that we couldn’t re-use the severed top of the plastic shelves. Two drills at the ready, and armed with my large plastic jar of may-come-in-handy bits, I fixed the old top, vertically to the side of the renewed liquids rack and, using long screws, locked it tightly in six places against the verticals of the shelving. The hard ‘webbed’ surface was perfect for the use of plastic ties. A short time later, we had a place where shorter garden tools could be slipped into strong plastic loops and tightened… all made from scrap pieces of plastic and large-packet Amazon wrapping.

Returning to the other side of the left wall, there was a problem with the tool cabinet’s feet – four large castor wheels, allowing it to be pushed around on a hard level floor. But on cobbles from 1820! Even Hercules would shudder… Removing the wheels was a matter of sliding the casings out of the ‘loose from new’ plastic housings. I put the heavy castors to one side. They were the best made part of the cabinet and would possibly come in handy within the house. Wheel-less, it stood more firmly on the ever-present, ever uneven cobbles.

“If it were snowing, we could tow it away on a sleigh,” I heard myself mutter. And then thought about what I’d said. Flat runners would at least average out the effects of the cobbles. I scrambled to retrieve two lengths of scrap wood and one of Peter’s old jam jars in which he had stored a selection of basic washers. The cabinet’s plastic was flimsy, but I suspected that the right fat-screw and washer combination would fix it to anything below. I could drill through the cabinet anywhere I liked, there was no strength in any of it…

I examined the interior of the cabinet to check where the structure was weakest. Pulling my head back to the daylight, I noticed that two of the older timber battens ran down the wall at the back.

Thirty minutes later, the ugly red box was not only secure, it was drilled and screwed so tightly into what was around it that it had become an integral part of Salty Pete’s structure. I grunted in triumph. I wasn’t just remodelling the interior, I was building a Favela!

Keen to keep the momentum going, I located everything I could find related to my drills: bits galore (thank you, Dad), plastic plugs of all sizes, the lot. I stuffed them all into their new home, with the twin drills on top and… and stood back; looking from garden tools, across the expanse of the left wall to the new, bright red, ‘drill station’.

It felt really good, until I focussed on the actual wall between these twin triumphs. Before me was a patchwork of ancient red pegboard, slotted-in timbers for support, and a wealth of old MDF pieces to fill the gaps. Each was a different colour. The effect wasn’t vital, it was ‘dead’ and old… Whatever happened next with that important central section, I didn’t want it backed by such a sad base…

We needed a break from the past, and colour was the most powerful technique I knew. But the spirit of the project was to do it by re-use and upcycling–spending no additional money in the process.

I knew that, in the back of one of the nastiest corners of the building, (Square 5 on our map) buried beneath a pile of other things – including our ‘bagged’ Brompton folding cycles, were two ten litre plastic drums of white emulsion paint. They had been left over from decorating the house when it was finally complete, back in 2012. I doubted they would still be usable… But they were the best chance I had of changing the ‘feel’ of Salty Pete… without spending a penny!

But, first, I had to dig my way to them…

Twenty minutes later, sweating profusely with the effort of shifting enough stuff to get in there, I located them in the near darkness. They were as far back as they could be, and against the old stone of the back wall. As I inched towards them, I looked sideways, for motivation, at the shining red side of my new ‘Drill Station’…. and saw the remarkable blue eyes of a large rat looking back at me…

To be continued…

Other parts of the Locked Down and Armed series:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, this is Part Five

©Copyright Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.