Rufus The Doofus

I’ve been working on cleaning the garage the past few days. Why? I needed to find a 14mm box-end wrench recently and gave up after up after 30 minutes of digging through piles and boxes. I know I have at least six of these wrenches somewhere in the garage. The whole experience reminded me of trying to find stuff in my uncle Tom’s garage.

When we moved from California to Maine all of my tools and “garage stuff” went into the building we refer to as “the barn”. Most of it sat there untouched for a few years until we started renovating the barn to become our house. Before starting on the barn-house project we built an attached garage next to the barn and moved all of that garage stuff into the new garage with no rhyme or reason to its placement. It’s all been there in piles and boxes until a few days ago.

My uncle Tom’s garage was special. It contained every tool you could ever want, somewhere, you just had to find it. He claimed to know where everything was and if an item wasn’t where he thought it was then “godammit, someone must have moved it”. I had that deja vue moment of being in Tom’s garage when I found something that I didn’t know I had. I thought to myself: “Hey, look at that. I didn’t know I had that. I guess I shouldn’t have bought another one of those just last week.” Tom must have thought that to himself hundreds of times over the years though he’d never admit it.

Hopefully in a week or so I’ll have all of my tools organized so the next time I need a 14mm box-end wrench I’ll know exactly where it is. Knowing where my tools are will come in handy when I get back to work on the Mustang so I can get it in shape to sell it.

Know anyone looking for a 1967 Mustang Fastback?

Tags: No Comments