Sunday, August 30, 2009

Cleaning the Lair

My son and I were cleaning out his basement "lair" yesterday and today (and will continue the next couple of days!). He is the typical boy with a zillion projects in various stages, and too many demands on "his" time to get back to each of them. (That darned school year interferes with all the fun he wants to have...)

While we were down there we came across a trebuchet that he and my husband made a few years ago. I remembered that the counterweight was a plastic bottle full of . . . MONEY. I snagged the counterweight and brought it upstairs to see if I had struck gold. Sure enough, by the time I finished counting and rolling the coins I had very dirty hands but over $100!

But don't worry about the trebuchet. It will still work. The reason we were cleaning things out is that my friend Brian has my son taking apart old computer equipment and printers and harvesting certain parts for recycling. One of the cool things my son has located and harvested for himself are several very heavy shiny metal disks with holes in the middle. Enough to string together to make a counter weight and better than the use he was putting them to -- which was leaving them in a stack until he figured out a use for them.

The first photo is the work table that will eventually be useful again once we finish. On the floor to the left you can see a long countertop (behind the robots) that we're going to put along that wall with triangular supports so we can store the printers in process underneath. That will help the workflow! Most of them are not even in the room in this photo.

The second photo is "his" sofa. This is the very cleaned up version of the lair, but it's not as good as it's going to be when we're finished. I'll take photos then so he'll have a standard for when I ask, "is it cleaned up?" before he gets to start a new project. Hey, I can dream, right?

I am amazed at what is still down there. We have Legos, Lincoln Logs, Cowboys & Indians, Star Wars stuff, Soldiers of all eras and sizes, soldiers' equipment, marble raceway, Maerklin trains and track (from his grandfather), airplanes in all shapes and sizes, ship and airplane models, wooden blocks, all manner of Air Soft weapons and ammo, a huge bin of stuffed animals, a drawer full of different kinds of batteries, one of power cords, one of "interesting electronic things that we don't really know what they go to", a costume trunk, costume closet and props for movie making, marbles, several remote control toys (dinosaur, hovercraft, helicopters, robots and airplanes), hot wheels and matchbox cars, and the sofa. He's begging me to leave the sofa for him (it is very comfortable) so the deal is only if he physically moves it and cleans underneath it AND harvests from underneath the cushions. I'm such a mean mom.

So after spending two hours of my Saturday
afternoon and two of my Sunday afternoon helping him do this, yeah, I'm keeping the $100...what do YOU think I ought to spend it on?

/kw

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When your done there you can take a stroll to my room LOL. What a lot of stuff he has in there but good that stuff is being recycled. Isn't it amazing as to what you can find when you do things like this? I think you should spend it on whatever you think you want. :) Something special that you found with extra money and hard work :)

Charlene Amsden said...

Whatever you spend the money on should be pure luxury! No necessities.