It’s another post about the big plywood box I’m building in the basement! I keep adding to it even though I haven’t brought it to your attention in quite a while. If I had, the posts would have looked something like this: It’s a big box. It’s a bigger box. It’s an even bigger box. So you can probably see why I haven’t mentioned it.

I’ve been making the box bigger and bigger each weekend by adding more benchwork on either side. It would make one hell of a great basement bar if I changed gears at this point and put a walnut top on it right now, lined the wall with shelves for gin and rum, and hung a disco ball from the ceiling. Too bad I don’t drink anything stronger than beer. And I’m boring. A basement bar just doesn’t fill any of my social needs.

A basement train set, on the other hand, suits my social needs perfectly. Make what you want out of that, I’ve come to terms with it. So there won’t be any walnut top, no bottle-lined shelves and no disco ball. Instead, there will be fluorescent lighting and a nifty control panel to make the trains go around. It’s not as wild and crazy as a bar but it’s still kind of fun if you never bothered to mature any farther than eight years old.

The train tracks will make a big figure eight, crossing in the middle of the room over the big box in the center, so I’ve been working on building the bench tops that reach out like wings from either end of the middle. Last weekend I added wings to the right, and although you can’t quite see it in this photo, I spent a few nights this week putting together one of the wings on the left. Then I had a facepalm moment.

I realized as I was finishing up the left-hand wing that after the benchwork was put together I’d have one hell of a time turning on the overhead fluorescent lights. Up until this point I’d been walking right up to them and yanking on the pull chain. That’s no problem right now, but after the benchwork covers the floor and fills in that whole end of the basement I won’t be able to walk over to the lights on the far side of the room at all, so building the benchwork came to a screeching halt while I mulled over how to wire together all the lights.

And that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend. A few trips to the hardware store, a few hours on a stepladder, a little cussing and some sore muscles later, and now the lights are plugged into a series of overhead electric outlets that are connected by an easy-to-get-to switch on the wall. And now I can get back to building a great big box.