Don’t worry, I didn’t get rid of the truck.

My home is roughly 16’ x 6’, or 96 ft². That makes it a little smaller than your average bedroom. In other words, it’s in my best interest to optimize how I use my limited space. Two years ago, I talked about consolidating and defragmenting how I laid out my room. The diagram I used looked like this:

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By rearranging my things (all three of them), I was able to clear up some space. Not that I actually used that space for anything, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Though as time went on, my tidy arrangement kinda…fell apart. I shuffled stuff around to help people move, I threw things away, I loaded and unloaded everything to make room for repairs, and just generally accumulated some cruft along the way. If I were to draw the diagram again as of last week, it’d look like this:

Once upon a time there was an ugly truck.

He was a lonely soul, a poor mess of rust and twisted metal, left to idle all alone. While certainly a sad state of affairs, it hadn’t always been this way for him. In his youth as a rental truck, he’d helped families move every which way. Later, he became a work truck, the lifeblood of an independent carpenter. As fulfilling as his past had been, it had also left its fair share of chips and dents and scrapes and scratches, which he wore like badges of honor.

Truthfully, I’ve been doing a pretty awful job at keeping you guys updated with what I’m actually doing, truckwise. The last time I even showed off the interior in all its shanty glory was almost a year ago. In the intervening interval since my last Home Improvement update, I’ve completed a few fairly large truck projects. By “large”, I don’t mean anything that requires any real technical competence, but certainly larger than fixing the hole or doing arts and crafts.

It’s been long enough.

I took my sweet time getting around to actually doing it, and then almost another month on top of that to start writing this post about it, but we’re here now. And that’s what really matters, right?

So anyway, you might remember “The Hole” from that time that birds always insisted on pecking at it, or that other time that I MacGyver’d a drainage solution to avoid waking up in a truck-shaped rainwater swimming pool. Looking back, I had every intention of paying another human being money to fix this particular problem. That all changed once I received an email from Nancy (over at PK Safety), who, like BoscoBob before her, knows way more about fixing my problems than I do.

Desiccant.

I really enjoy the way that word sounds. It’s like a discount version of decadent, except that it hasn’t been soiled by rampant overuse in chocolate commercials. I was curious as to its etymology which, as you’ll see above, isn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped. I had never even heard of the word until a reader, known only to me as “BoscoBob”, brought it up in an email.

It’s been a while (six months almost to the day) since I did my last big Home Improvement post, and I think it’s about high time we changed that. Not only because a lack of Home Improvement posts signals stagnancy on the front of truck-progress, but also because there is much to be improved upon truck-wise, and I should be more proactive and motivated to work on it. This, as is likely evident from the title, is just a “Mini” Home Improvement project, but there are two fairly large ones that I’ve yet to write about, so expect those soon eventually.

It’s been a while since my last Home Improvement post, which is bad because it means I’m not improving the truck. And trust me, the truck certainly does have areas for improvement. Anyway, I mentioned that I got a new bike recently. This was great but, like every time I get something new, it posed an issue.

I’m now in possession of a large, 50 pound hunk of metal and rubber, which I have to store somewhere. It makes sense to keep it with me, because:

Look at that stupid thing. With its silly little drawers and its wooden frame. Pfft.

In reality, it’s just a simple four drawer dresser from Ikea, which I definitely needed because I’ve been living out of a suitcase my mother lent me, and I need to return it eventually. This project was my first two-day project, and in total took me about six hours to complete. Nothing went horribly wrong per se, it’s just that Ikea is Satan incarnate, as it turns out. As you can probably tell from my demeanor, I’ve never assembled anything from Ikea before, but I figured for something as simple as a dresser, it couldn’t be that bad.

My first two Home Improvement Projects weren’t exactly the highest caliber works of craftsmanship. For example, putting more than two or three articles of clothing on the clothes rack caused it to bend, shake, and warp, and the rope around the bed came undone approximately once a day. So my third Home Improvement Project was setting right what I had previously done so, so wrongly. And it’s the weekend, which means that after my workout and shower, the sky was the limit as far as errand-running was concerned.

With the bed out of the way, I was ready to try bigger and better things. The next thing on my list was a place to hang my dress shirts and pants. In a real-world setting, this would be called a “clothes rack”. So I took another trip down to Home Depot, which is quickly becoming the most important place in my life, and I picked up some screws, a screwdriver, some clothes hangers, two mounting brackets, and a 6 foot long wooden rod. If I had done everything correctly, here is how the process should have gone:

One important part of this whole process is turning the back of a truck into a livable, comfortable space. I have a number of plans and ideas on how to do that, and I’m going to chronicle my attempts at turning them into realities in this “Home Improvement” series. This one is a super basic one, but hey, baby steps. If I plan on living in this thing, I’ll need a place to sleep, naturally. So I wandered over to Craigslist, found the sketchiest new mattress and box spring set I could find, and placed an order. Notice the word “new”, that’s super important, because I’m not in the mood for a case of bed bugs or crabs or whatever else you can catch from a used mattress.