Sensing

As an ISFJ, I must occasionally satisfy my “Sensing” side, that is, the bit of me that wants to work with tools, to be practical, to be outside. How can one do all that at once? Three little words: home improvement project!

When grandson Max was first born, he and his parents lived with us for while. To make some space for them, I cleared out a closet of my dress shirts and pants and then hung them on a length of copper pipe in Kathy’s and my bedroom. I just set one end of the pipe on a bookcase and the other on my dresser. It worked fine. Everything I needed was right there. The arrangement wouldn’t win any design awards, but who sees it anyway?

Later, when we absorbed furniture from Kathy’s mom’s house, I replaced my dresser with a beautiful highboy—the match to the dresser that Kathy has been using for years. There was no room for my clothes rack, so everything went back into a closet in another bedroom. After a while I realized I was using three different rooms to get dressed, with my stuff spread all over the upstairs. I looked for, not exactly an armoire, but something that I could hang my shirts on once again, but there didn’t seem to be anything that would really work for me. So I decided to build one myself.

Overnight I thought about what I wanted, then measured everything and drew a diagram with several views (my father was a civil engineer so I must have picked up something from him). I figured out how much wood I would need and what sort of hardware and then went to Lowe’s at 6am on Labor Day to buy the supplies.

(The intention for the Mass that day was for a good friend of ours who died from Lou Gehrigs’ disease a year ago, and his wife was doing the readings, so I went to church before starting the project. It gave me a chance to pray for help, and of course everything went great.)

I spent the rest of the day in the garage happily sawing, screwing fastening and gluing to my heart’s content, all according to the plan I had drawn. When I was done woodworking, I stained my creation a couple of times and let it sit overnight.

Kathy was very impressed. I, however, wondered why it looked like one of her father’s basement projects and then it came to me—I had used a can of stain that I rescued from his basement after the house had been sold. No wonder it resembled his work—he had used the same stain on a bookcase he built some years ago.

It now sits next to our bed, loaded up with dress shirts—just the way I hoped it would work out. Kodiak just harrumphed when he saw it, since it means he can no longer sprawl out in the little nook by my side of the bed. That’s fine with me, since now I won’t be stepping on his furry self whenever I get up in the night.