Having 1,000 Screws Loose

I’ve been sitting on a wooden stool in my cold workshop for three hours now, separating nuts, bolts, and other random bits into piles. I’m pretty sure this is what OCD feels like.

When we bought a house after moving back from Spokane in 1998, the former order left behind a one-gallon bucket full of screws, nails, and bolts out in the garage. Because the bucket is so densely packed it is impossible to find anything specific, and digging in the bucket with bare hands is a recipe for tetanus. Because of this I rarely use any of the screws or anything else in the bucket. I have now been been moving this bucket from house to house for 25 years.

Over the weekend I decided I either needed to separate the contents of the bucket into useable piles or get rid of it. Armed with a Monster energy drink and a pair of latex gloves, I dumped the nuts and bolts out into a pile on my workbench and began sorting.

Sorting a pile of coins, even a big pile, goes pretty fast. For starters, pennies are a different color so they’re easy to slide aside. Nickels, dimes, and quarters are all physically different sizes and feel different to the touch. It’s also easy to sort multiple coins at a time.

None of that applies when sorting a thousand sharp metal objects stored in a bucket. Nails, screws, and bolts all look relatively similar. Some of the nails have threads that make them look like screws. Some of the bolts have heads that make them look like screws, too. All the nuts and washers sink to the bottom of the pile, and thin nuts sometimes look like thick washers. As obvious as it sounds, the only way to sort a thousand similar things is to pick up a thousand things one at a time, look and touch each one, and sort them into piles.

I don’t know how many hours I spent sorting this big pile of sharp pointy things into smaller piles of sharp things. What started as four piles — nails, screws, nuts, and bolts — doubled as I began to discover washers, thumbtacks, wall hooks, and plastic wall anchors. In a perfect world these piles would eventually get divided into sub-piles (wood nails, roofing nails, finishing nails…) and while having all the nails mixed together isn’t ideal, it’s better than it was.

A couple of years ago I bought an older flat screen television for $5 at a garage sale, and about a month ago I connected an old Roku device I had laying around to it which means I can stream movies and, on this particular occasion, episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. After roughly three hours and multiple stories of murder, bank robberies, and Bigfoot sightings, I decided I had more than enough nails, screws, bolts and nuts to last me a lifetime. I sorted until the ends of my fingers were sore from being poked and took the remainder of the pile — about 25% of what I started with — and pushed it off into a trash can.

Project over.

Out in my workshop I have a milk crate full of old wall adapters. Some of the adapters in that crate are older than my children. My brain says to keep them because I might need them, but the number of times I’ve actually used one multiplied by the number of years I’ve been saving them hardly justified their existence.

In the future when I build anything I remotely care about, I’m sure the budget for that project will include new nails and screws. But if I’m looking for a single nut, or a washer just the right size, I now have a curated collection I can peruse — another lifetime’s supply, no doubt.