Time Flies

This post marks an aniversary of sorts. The first time I wrote one of these "Twisted From the Sprue" stories was in the summer of 2000. My IPMS chapter was trying to launch a monthly newsletter and I had a "column" under the" Twisted from the Sprue"  name. One of those first essays was about packing and relocating my modeling workbench as my family moved to a bigger house, a memory that came flooding back as my wife and I took the downsizing plunge this year and moved once again.

 Boxed up stash in the new man cave.

Statistics say that American adults will move about 9 times in their life. That just sounds ridiculous - until you think about all those moves when you first set out on your own and hopped from one shabby apartment and bad landlord to another. Most suburban Americans follow a path that goes something like:

• Crummy single-person apartments, stay just long enough to find a better place.
• Get married and buy a small starter house that is all you can afford, own it about 10 years until...
• You have kids and buy a big family house in a good school district. Live their 20+ years until the kids have all moved out, and then...
• You downsize to a smaller low maintenance house to retire in.

Here in Pittsburgh I suspect we tend to move less than the averages. The city is divided up into a lot of small neighborhoods, and people become strongly attached to where they grew up or bought their first home: I know quite a few people who will likely live all of their adult life in just one house.

I was ready to live in my 2 story 4 bedroom until they carried me out (I was patiently waiting for my last at-home kid to "leave the nest" so I could move my modeling stuff from the basement into her room). But there is an old Yiddish proverb: "We plan, God laughs". Bad knees run in my wife's family; a few years ago she let me know she would not be climbing stairs every day during our retirement years. We started preparing for our last move to a ranch-style house, where "preparing" was equal parts fixing things and painting rooms to make our old house more sell-able while getting rid of stuff that we wouldn't have room for in a smaller house.

That downsizing thing is harder than it sounds, especially for your typical pack-rat modeler like me. I can do the math: total-kits divided by builds-per-year isn't just longer than I'll ever live, its approaching infinity. But I don't care - my model stash is modest and it makes me happy to look at the kits and think about which one I'll do next - and its not going anywhere.

The nice thing about "ranch" style houses is that they have giant basements. The previous owner of the house we bought had finished half the basement, including an office with an entire wall of built-in bookshelves - shelves that would swallow both my model stash and reference books with room left over for a few select new kits. And the unfinished half of the basement has plenty of room to store holiday decorations and left-over buckets of paint and such; for once my modeling space is not competing for square footage with anything else and I'm hopeful it will help put a few more finished models on the display shelf. I even snagged a display shelf - an aging glass curio cabinet that used to be in our dining room that wouldn't fit in our new space.

Still, it was kind of sad to pack up my stuff and see how many projects had stalled and ended up "resting in pieces", tucked back into boxes and placed on the "shelf of doom".

 A lot of those projects stalled when it came time to paint, which meant dragging out an airbrush - so I'm trying to figure out how to install a proper spray booth vent in the unfinished half of my basement. Or maybe in the garage, which would mean carrying parts from the basement through the house for painting sessions - but still worth it for a more permanent setup.

Writing this made me think of the last Calvin & Hobbes comic strip - click through and take a look at what I mean when I say this about my downsizing adventure: "Its a day full of possiblities".