Out of Chaos, Opportunity Arises

According to our latest utility bill our water use had doubled each month for the past two months.  Turns out we had a leak somewhere under the house.  Considering the state of our old pipes, and not knowing exactly where the leak was, it was the right time to go ahead and replumb the whole place.  After a disruptive week of living without water during the day and sharing a bathroom every night, the leak was located and the pipe repaired. 

The pipes for the upstairs bathroom are in the den wall and ceiling.

However, in the process of ripping out and replacing all of the old pipes a minor storm of drywall dust was created and indiscriminately deposited all over the den.  The layout, my workbench, my wife's workbench, the bookshelves, my son's computer station, and everything else in this space was covered in a layer of fine powder.  Had we expected it, we would have covered the lot.  

Now, just over a week after the walls were closed up, I'm nearly done resetting the house, repainting the walls and well into a thorough cleaning of the den.  Out of this chaos comes a chance to give the space a deep cleaning.  In addition to giving it all a thorough dusting I'm planning a major change.  

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed the blog for a while that my Summer Challenge 2026 has fallen by the wayside.  I'm not all that disappointed since I've been able to accomplish many things I wanted to do instead.  Unfortunately for this blog they're not any sort of content related to model trains.  For example, I finally got the hardware installed on our kitchen cabinets.  

What has been railroad related isn't really blog-worthy either.  I've been sorting my rolling stock by era, a solid first step towards an inventory.  The first pass into large groupings was enough to show me that two things are necessary; boxes and access.  Some stock I acquired came without individual boxes and have been living together, wrapped in paper, in larger boxes.  This makes knowing what's there very difficult and sorting it even more so.  

Boxes are a simple fix.  The second thing, access, is a bit trickier.  I truly believe the foundation of contentment is gratitude for what you already have.  In order to fully appreciate these trains I need to run them.  That means they need to be accessible near the layout, not buried deep in plastic tubs out in the garage.  I have a cabinet which, after some modifications, will make a fine staging and storage area for trains but there's no room for it under the layout.  Yet.

Paint, supplies and parts.

In order to make room I'll need to find new homes for most of what's there.  Ideally, I would like to fit paints, tools and supplies in the space around my workbench, but that's going to take some careful puzzling to fit those pieces in place and a judicious culling of what doesn't need to be there.  It is time to consider what is the bare minimum I'd like to have at this bench in order to build and paint models.

The current state of things.