15/2025: Preserving what matters

Image © Jose 2025

I am sore, and tomorrow I’ll be more.

I spent 3 hours yesterday and 4 more today sanding a wooden table, one of those round turn oval wooden tables, made of beautiful solid wood, heavy as a grand piano. I’m not done, still have maybe 3 hours to finish sanding, another couple to prep it up for a stain that will match the floor that was also there.

This table was in the house we bought, according to the previous owner memories “Always pasta on Sunday afternoon. Lamb and lasagna on Easter. Chestnut-apple stuffing filled the Thanksgiving turkey. On Christmas eve, it was the “seven fishes”… and wine, lots of red wine.” So, you understand why I had to take care of this table myself, manual treatment with the help of a few electrical sanders. Electrical sanders that also belonged to the previous owner, who left behind a fantastic trove of any tool you can think of, dating back at least 50 years.

My dad was a tinkerer, and an inventor of sorts, I still have some paperwork from a couple of his patents. My Mom would recognize the difference in posture when he wanted to buy something, or when he wanted to move something around the house, she said it was either the hands in front of the body, crossed over his chest, or behind is back (can’t remember which was which). In any case, she would recognize and warn me, the moving things around usually involved me and others. He would open up broken equipment and fix it meticulously, he would extend/ alter/ modify, basically design new solutions based on what he thought was needed, he did that all his life until he went blind from diabetic retinopathy, and that was hard on him and on all of us. After he went blind, he didn’t lose his touch, in fact it became stronger, he would tell me to get under a machine and he would give me specific, detailed instructions of what to do, he would be standing there, dictating or directing me. I remember once, after I told him the job was done, he asked if I had placed a washer in a specific place, I said I did. He got down on the floor, went with his hand, his large but sensitive fingers, to find I had missed it. So I had to disassemble and assemble the machine again. This was my upbringing, though now I spend most of time on a keyboard, I love getting my hands dirty and I have a deep respect for anyone who does the work to maintain and preserve things.

The previous owner was a tinkerer too, and someone that would not throw anything away as long as it could be used somehow, even if for parts. I found three different electrical sanders, they all worked, needed a little oil and that was it. One of them, a vintage Craftsman, made of cast aluminum, an older vibrating pad sander, likely from the mid-20th century when Craftsman tools were built with heavier metal bodies and a very rugged construction. At a certain point, the switch probably broke, and the gentleman made a whole on the side of the equipment and placed a toggle switch on it. The switch was plastic, and a few uses collapsed it, I hotwired it for the moment, I wanted to use his sander on his table, which I did. I will try and buy some components to rebuild this one, it deserves that attention.

I am sore, but I am happy.