You wouldn’t think so, but putting away Christmas decorations affects my woodworking. And not in a good way.

Right after the holidays our home storage is in turmoil. The Christmas stuff (of which we have enough to decorate the house on Downton Abbey) needs to be moved back up to the attic. Conversely, with winter underway in earnest our cross-country skiing stuff, shovels, salt, scrapers, space heaters and other winter gear stored up there needs to come down.

With mass quantities of stuff changing places, my wife always feels that it’s also a good time for general household rearranging, meaning that a bunch of other stuff should be atticized. Meanwhile, stuff we haven’t used for a year or two is brought down to take its place in the house.

There are four irrevocable things associated with all of this:

1. This changeover process generally takes at least two weeks.

2. Until it’s decided what’s going up and what’s coming down, the changeover is “in-progress” for this entire time.

3. The attic is over my shop, and the attic stairs fold down right between my main workbench and the benchtop on a long built-in base cabinet along the wall.

4. Both my workbench and that cabinet benchtop – and much of the floor around them – are buried under “in-progress” stuff going either up or down.

Of course, this all results in a fifth irrevocable thing:

5. Technically, I don’t have a shop right now. I have a deployment area.

A.J.