I tend to be slightly messy in my workspace, whether it’s tying flies or writing about fly fishing. I think it adds a creative, mad-scientist je ne sais quoi to the experience. But, there’s a point where messy looses its charm and morphs into the dreaded enemy of productivity. Worst case, it threatens your sanity. I’m generally a happy guy, and no one wants or needs to get pissed off when they’re tying flies. But writing the Farmington River book meant that I had less time to do other things, and one of them was to organize my work/tying room in the basement. This month, I finally got the toolbench under control and hung up a shiny new pegboard. My bigger tools and other implements of destruction are now all neatly stored in their proper location on metal shelving. That left my tying area.
BEFORE. Good lord, what a disaster. Messes grew exponentially, like a snowball rolling down a hill. While I had vast stores of tying materials in boxes, many of them were crammed to the point of being too hard to find that hackle when you needed it. What’s more, the system of box-stacked-upon-box was frustrating as hell: pick it up, move it elsewhere, find another box, re-stack it, arrrrrrrgh. Time to put an end to this madness!AFTER. Much better! Room to breathe, and, truth be told, this is a work in progress with some organizing still to be done. But this is a much more ergonomic workspace. The question you’re probably asking is, “What the heck did you do with all those boxes?”TA-DAH! Enter the Uline Wire Picking Cart. It measures 48″x18″x69″, with four angled shelves and one top rack. That’s plenty of space to hold materials bins, hook boxes, and threads and wires. But its best feature is that it’s on wheels. So all I have to do to access it from my chair is to roll it next to the desk. It’s a sturdy build with a very smooth roll, and I can reach the vast majority of boxes from my seat, which delights my lazy side no end. I’ve strategically placed the boxes I use the most on the lower three angled racks.
As I use the cart and test drive the work space, I’ll revisit the subject and let you know how it’s working in a future post. But for now, I’ve got flies to tie…
currentseams.com 