Spent most of yesterday emptying, cleaning, and reorganizing my ancestral small parts drawers and starting to sort and put away the various junk filling the garage.
Mostly it was sorting the bolts and screws by size, and then I sorted all the nails and tacks by size and metal type (copper, brass, steel, aluminum). Wing nuts. Cap nuts. Other nuts. Lots of eye bolts. One of the boxes had a drawer full of loose BB pellets, which of course were also mixed through every single drawer.
I am trying to slowly work my way through my dad's tool/hardware collection. It was always such a mess, he would literally buy new stuff instead of trying to find something he already had. My dad really liked to be neat and organized, but I don't think he ever learned how to actually sort out an existing mess. He had mentioned to me a couple of times that he'd basically given up on the tools in the garage because it was too daunting for him to start.
I've been trying not to think about it too much and get sad that I didn't do this earlier. He would have been thrilled to see everything cleaned up and organized.
There has been a lot of sad lately. Normally I would find it very relaxing to sort screws into tiny containers. And, had this been a year ago, there would be a sort of treasure hunting thrill to it. The feeling that all these tiny parts have been abandoned and they can be mine if I just clean it up. But now I've just inherited this whole mess so they're all mine anyway.
No 'before' pictures, but this is after I put everything back:
I think the one on the left was my paternal grandpa's, and the the on the right had handwritten labels that look like my maternal grandpa. The unit on the right was originally unpainted and very rusty, so I cleaned off the rust and gave it a spray paint job. Each little drawer got emptied, washed, and then re-sorted, so there are a bunch of empty drawers now I can start to fill up as I go through the rest of the junk.
This is the remaining workbench, aka junk:
And here's the "new" tool bench that my dad started up because he couldn't bear to look at that side of the garage any more:




















