Plastic Drawers and engine fires

Sorry for the longer gap, but things have been getting interesting here. My clean out of the sewing room has been going well. So well I had filled the front garden with junk. This the Landrover decided was the perfect moment to catch fire. I wasn’t quite so convinced of this perfection as you may imagine. However you do what you have to and with the weather forecasters predicting gales I figured I had better get a rubbish collection service to pick it up. That is easier said than done. From past experience a lot like to arrive partially load then up the price. it seems to be the set scam. The one I booked went for trying to collect 2 hours early (when I was out at an appointment as I had told them) then denying I existed. The second I tried however were great. Clearabee will come the same day. They did quote a little higher than the first company but as they didn’t then drive up the price when they arrived (on time) I can live with that. So if you find yourself stuck and they operate in your area I would absolutely recommend them.

Now on to why there was so much junk in the front garden. When I put together my sewing room I tried to save money and used a lot of plastic drawer units. My cutting table was on 2 of the big colourful sets that are aimed at children’s rooms, and my big storage space had more similar in.  Had is the key word I have dumped them all.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

This pretty much covers plastic drawers. Day 1 they are fine. They are cheap, they hold your stuff and the place looks tidy. Very quickly the drawers get hard to pull in and out. This encourages the less tidy to not put things away. It’s hard to put it away and you know it will be hard to get it back out, so you don’t do it. Over time they distort more, the stuff in them stays there mostly forgotten and partially replaced until the big purge hits and you discover that everything in the drawers is filthy because dust gets in just fine. I now have a huge pile of fabric to wash (don’t store fabric folded edge up in plastic drawers) and a fair amount of dead glue and duplicate items. I think the large plastic drawers were about 20 pounds each. The cube storage I have replaced them with is about 30 each and yes 2 would have done the job. So for half as much again as what I spent I could have had something that worked from day one and helped keep the room tidy. I have actually spent a bit more because I wanted to maximise storage and have it on wheels. I did look for a second hand sideboard. I actually think that might be the perfect cutting table if you can find one, but the thing with second hand furniture is it comes up when it comes up. You can’t predict it and I am on a deadline to sort this room out.  My lesson from this is if it is something you need to work cheap may be the wrong answer. A good item at a low price will work, or a new slightly more expensive item, but buying purely on cost is a way to get into a bigger mess later and ultimately spend more than was needed. On the upside the plastic drawers are destined for recycling not landfill, but still in use would have been even better.