Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Why I Never Throw Anything Away

We make a gallon of formula every day, so a few months ago we bought a Pur water filter. The pediatrician said that plain tap water was fine, so maybe it's a waste, but we like the piece of mind. Tonight, as I was washing bottles, the faucet started spraying water everywhere when I turned it on.

I fiddled with the tap a little, and found the problem. The aerator that came with the Pur filter is a little cheap black plastic thing, and the plastic had actually split. No idea how that happened -- I wasn't washing bottles that enthusiastically. But, since I am a packrat, I still had the original aerator for our faucet and all the little adapters that came with the filter. And I even knew where they were!

After a couple of minutes of trying to stick adapters together like a monkey assembling a carburetor (a really smart monkey, mind you), I got everything hooked up and working smoothly. Just think what would have happened if I threw things out!

As I was organizing the boiler room over the weekend I found, at the bottom of a pile on the workbench, the old broken hinges for the saloon doors in the kitchen. My first thought was, Wow, there is no reason I could ever possibly need these again. We don't have more swinging doors, and these are broken.

My second thought was, Where should I put these?

Don't worry. I found just the right place.

1 comment:

Schawately said...

My wife and I have lived on S. Clifton in a 1912 home for 12 years now. This post of yours reminded me of one of the things we wished we had done better: being better organized with regards to all the old items we store in our boiler room. We find things years later and say, "Now, what was that for again?" Or, "Why were we keeping that thing?" Anyway, the use of labels with useful information such as what the item is, what it was used for and why it was being saved would be very useful information to have. I do a lot of DIY projects myself and have found that I had to build a 16' long workbench in my garage just so I could do the work that constantly needs to be done! Good luck with the blog/house/triplets!