Plastic to replace the incomplete and increasingly fragile curtain separating the work area in the basement from common storage areas arrived yesterday. The old plastic will provide plenty of shields to keep epoxy from grabbing what I do not want it to grab. This new, heavy (6 mil) translucent plastic was intended for farmers who use it to protect crops. I bought about the smallest roll of it I could order (8×25 feet). I have about twice as much as I need. My plan was to hang it from part of the steel beam running the length of the basement using small, viciously powerful magnets. Alas, the magnets didn’t grip the beam very well even with just a layer or two of plastic intervening. So I auditioned PVC clamps made from 2-inch wide rings of 4-inch schedule 80 pipe. Those worked. The plastic hangs in two layers, with some excess at the top which I gathered up so that the bottom of the curtain is a couple of inches above the floor, the better to sweep up. The result is nowhere near as neat as I had hoped (think NASA clean room), but it may hang better after it de-wrinkles under its own weight for a while. When I feel ambitious, perhaps I can “furl” the excess and use the PVC rings to contain it. (ETA: nope, the PVC clamps would not grip the slick plastic over the tapering steel. They just migrated off overnight. Now I’m using regular old C-clamps.)

I made a “table” out of a flat piece of faux wood atop a niche in the boxes. The need for such a thing finally percolated through my head while looking for a place to set my coffee. As with coffee, so with tools. A standard place to park whatever I happen to be using at any given moment will be important, because the potential for tools and supplies to simply go missing down there is huge. On the flip side, I’m going to need a designated trash bag / box / can, too. That can live under the tables. Have I mentioned that space is at a premium?

By and by, I’ll put a white board up among the boxes, too. It can hold the plans and let me keep notes, shopping lists, etc. It’s just in the way where it is now; if I move it to the shop, I can pretend to be organized.

A quick look through the kit and a perusal of the plans answered some questions but raised others. Par. I’ll feel better after I sweep and clean and generally straighten up. Photos to come.