Not everything works out and sometimes things just come out great. Here are three little things I did that worked out great.
- Hand drill: 50 years ago when I moved into my first ever house I purchased a hand drill. I always lived in an apartment first with my parents and then in Manhattan after I was working a few years. I never had to fix anything; we just called the super. Occasionally I had to hang a picture and got pretty good at that, but that is about all I did. After I moved into our house I would spend some time on Sundays with my infant son in a stroller walking around the hardware store trying to figure out what I needed to buy to get some things fixed. One day I had to screw a bunch of things on the walls and did not look forward to that since I was never good at getting it started and then completing the screwing process. I mentioned that to a salesman who took me to a hand drill and told me this would be the best thing I could ever buy in that store. It seemed pretty expensive at that time but he assured me that any tools I purchased should be the best quality and that would work out to be much less expensive in the long run. Slowly I acquired an entire arsenal of tools with a mini lesson on how to use each one accompanying every purchase. Well, I still have that hand drill and it still works as good as when it was brand new. It was the best purchase I ever made in that store since it made screwing every screw quicker and a pleasure. Also, I do not remember how much I paid, but even if I paid much more than I would have for a lesser quality drill, spreading that excess over 50 years (and still counting) makes it a meaningless amount. I just love that hand drill….
- Polyester twine: When newspaper recycling started, my township gave us free blue boxes for the papers. I subscribe to so many papers and magazines that I always have an overflow. To deal with that I had to tie the overflow into manageable size bundles and bought twine for that. Not every time, but more than I would like, the twine broke and I had to retie it. Every once in a while it broke while I was carrying the bundle to the curb for the pickup. To avoid that I started double tying the bundles – which became a pain in the neck. One day the salesman told me to try a new type of polyester twine which was a blessing and worked great and never tore. This went on for years and then one day when I needed to purchase another roll, they no longer had 275-foot rolls of anything and I had to settle for what they had which was a 525-foot roll of sisal twine. Well it just didn’t work and I was back to tying the bundles twice, which was still a pain in the neck. At some point I went back to the hardware store and spoke to a salesman who told me he knew what I meant but they only had a box of 6,500 feet of polyester twine which cost a small fortune so I left without buying it. On the way home I asked myself if I was crazy not buying it. I would keep it in my garage so storage wasn’t a problem and on a per foot basis it was much cheaper than the smaller rolls and this way I would never have to buy twine again, so I returned to the store and bought that big box. I don’t remember when that was, but it was easily more than a dozen years ago and the tying actually became fun. I just love that big box of twine…..
- Package ties: I use these big 50-gallon garbage bags and they used to come with package ties. At some point they made the tops of the bags a little different so you could tie them, and they stopped including ties in the box. I never got the hang of tying the bag and used whatever extra ties I had accumulated. At some point these ran out and I needed to tie the bags the way they were made to be tied. I did not like doing it that way and could not find any ties in the hardware store. One day I was picking up my cleaning and the hangers with the garments were tied together with what looked like a 7-inch tie. I ask the lady taking care of me if she would sell me $10 worth of ties – I had to repeat that two more times until she figured out what I was saying and then she couldn’t stop laughing. The next time I was there she had a generous box for me for $10. I just love those package ties…..
These are three inconsequential things that made my life much easier. These are three things that I would have never thought about without having a discomfort or dire need for them. The drill, the giant-size twine box, and package ties were paid for many times over with the discomfort it ended. They lessened the burden of regular chores I needed to do with little things I took for granted. There are many other little things that we could do to make our lives a little easier, it just needs thinking about it, or listening to a hardware salesman.
I hope you enjoyed the three little stories about three little things that eliminated three little, but not so little, discomforts for me.
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