On Black Friday while sitting in the Best Buy parking lot, a guy hit my car. This past weekend, we were finally able to get it in for repairs.
It all started because of a TV.
As you may recall, a couple of months ago my 55″ television died. If there was any silver lining to that cloud it was that the television had the courtesy to end itself just a few weeks before Black Friday. I asked Susan to keep an eye out for a good sale on televisions, and she found one — another 55″, for less than I paid for the first one, on sale at Best Buy. Susan paid for the television online and in the height of madness the morning of Black Friday, we went to pick it up.
Mind you, we didn’t have to pick it up then. We could have picked it up any time during a five day window. But if you know Susan, you know she loves to be in the middle of a madhouse. Remember those videos from the 1980s where mobs of people rushed into department stores, pushing and shoving to try and get a Cabbage Patch doll? Susan’s dream is to be in the middle of that. My dream is to be as far away as possible from that. Like, in Cambodia or something.
On the morning of Black Friday we made our way to Best Buy, parked in one of the curbside pick-up spots, and waited for someone to bring my new television out to me car. We hadn’t been parked for more than 30 seconds when we heard someone honking his Suburban’s horn aggressively at pedestrians as they had the audacity to walk through the parking lot. A few seconds later, the Suburban made its way down our row and began to pull into the parking spot next to ours. Now I just looked it up and the average Suburban is 81 inches wide and if I had to guess I would say that parking spot was 82″ wide. There was really no chance of him getting into that spot and if he did, there would be no way he (or we) could open our doors. Or breath.
And so of course when he pulled into the spot, he sideswiped my car. I wasn’t sure what had happened at first — all I knew is that my entire car moved, but we were in park. “Did that guy just hit my car?” I asked Susan, and before she could answer, he backed up and did it again.
HE BACKED UP AND DID IT AGAIN.
I took a few deep breaths and tried to calm myself before the man who hit my car came over to apologize and give us his insurance information… and after a couple of minutes we realized, the guy was not coming over or getting out of his car. He obviously thought we were not in the car and had we not been in there, 100%, he would have left and not left a note.
It was up to Susan to approach the driver, who acted like he didn’t know he had hit my car (twice). His response was to get out, look at the back of my side, and then try to clean off the damage with his spit. The paint had been completely scraped off my bumper and my taillight was cracked and he tried to fix those things with his magic spit. By the end of the interaction, he was grumbling under his breath and I was grumbling under mine and Susan handled everything.
Now here’s the thing. The damage is not “that” bad. If it had only been the bumper and not the taillight, I probably could have buffed most of it out and maybe covered the rest of it up with some paint. I’m not paint and body guy and I might have even been willing to live with it. My car already has a few nicks and dings, and I know filing a claim has the potential to raise this guy’s insurance. I am ashamed to admit this, but when a guy hits my car and then acts like he didn’t and was going to drive away, then that made the decision to file a claim against his insurance much simpler.
Over the weekend, Susan and I dropped my car off at the body shop. The estimate to repair the scuff and the taillight is $1,300. (We saved someone some money by not getting a rental car.) I tried to convince the body shop that the man’s Suburban had also caused all the hail damage, but they weren’t buying it.
I’m not sure how long the repair will take, but in the meantime the van has become my primary vehicle. Big Rob’s Van to the rescue!
Every year I start dozens of blog posts that never get finished. Sometimes I’ll start writing one and they simply don’t go anywhere. Other times I’ll start one and by the time I finish them they no longer seem relevant. According to WordPress I currently have 80 blogs in varying states of completion sitting in the draft folder. I may finish a few of them, but most of them will end up in the trash pile. Here are just a few that I’ve deleting this morning.
MIKE TYSON KO’S NETFLIX, LOSES TO FATHER TIME
I wrote a really long recap of the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight on Netflix. For some reason it took me a week to write it and by the time it was finished, nobody was talking about the fight anymore and it was old news.
BACK TO NORMAL
This was a really long blog post I wrote about the 2 1/2 weeks Susan was gone and I was home by myself. It mostly talked about how Susan stocks the refrigerator for me before she goes on long trips and how I end up eating fast food anyway. Apparently I ate a lot of frozen Italian beef sandwiches while she was gone. Riveting.
WHEN THE RULE OF FIVE MEETS THE TWO-MINUTE RULE
This was a post about to different rules I use. One is Susan’s “rule of five” which is whenever you walk into a room that’s messy, pick up five things. The other was an anti-procrastination tool I discovered called the two-minute rule which says if you think of a task and that task will take less than two minutes to complete, do it now instead of waiting to do it later. I may actually leave this one in the draft folder and revisit it.
PAIN, PART ONE
One night before I was on my back meds I started writing about my back pain and things got dark so I abandoned it. The back feels a little better now.
UNFOLLOWING INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS WITH POWERSHELL
This is a really long and technical post about how I wrote a script to automatically unfollow accounts that weren’t following my on Instagram. I’m pretty sure this goes against their TOS (who cares) and I honestly don’t know why I didn’t publish it. I’ll save this one for a rainy day.
CRUISE
This appears to be a summary of our cruise to Cozumel that we took with our friends Jeff and Heather. I know This appears to be a generic summary of the vacation that I never finished, and I know I wrote some more specific tales from that trip so at some point I decided this one was unnecessary. Buh-bye.
BED BUGS
Have you ever had one of those stories that never seems to end? One day while sitting in our recliner, Susan felt and then saw what she thought was a bed bug. This led to us throwing out my favorite recliner and I think maybe a couch. Then we threw away a bunch of pillows and bedding. Then we started putting powder on the floors and furniture. We eventually tracked the infestation down to a used Roomba we had paid $5 for at a garage sale (lesson learned). Then a few weeks later Susan was looking online and determined that they weren’t bed bugs at all, but carpet bugs, which probably came from the used Roomba. Carpet bugs are way easier to treat and after that it seemed like we threw away my recliner for nothing. The post went on for a few thousand words and got abandoned when the story never seemed to end.
SUPPER CLUB
Some friends of ours met us for dinner one night at a supper club. It was a super weird dining experience. Our meal took 2 1/2 hours from start to finish and all kinds of weird things happened, like possibly our waiter quit during out shift (we had at least three different servers) and at one point in the meal we noticed the air conditioner above our table was dripping water directly into my glass of water. The post never really got a point and you kind of need if you’re going to write 1,000 words about a meal, you kind of need one. Around the time I wrote this one I was vying for a food columnist position in a local magazine and the blog I wrote was so bad that I abandoned both it and the writing position I was pursuing.
THREADS IS THE TWITTER KILLER WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR
This was a half-baked post about how Meta’s Threads will destroy Twitter and that in a year everyone will be on Threads and Twitter will be a ghost town. Not only did I not finish the blog post but I never use Threads. This one didn’t age well in multiple categories! Deleted.
THE SWEETEST SOUND TO A PERSON’S EARS IS THEIR OWN NAME
This was a long, cranky rant about how I was recognized at work for fifteen years of service and during the ceremony they pronounced my last name wrong. The manager who mispronounced my name was one I had previously worked for. I won’t rehash the entire post but the gist of it was, if you want employees to feel appreciated for their service, maybe you should take 5-10 seconds and learn how to pronounce their name, especially if you’re going to say it to a large group of their coworkers. This post was more than 500 words long and at least 350 of them wouldn’t have done me any favors at work. I was pretty mad when I wrote this one and it belongs in the trash pile.
ONE MONTH OF USING THE MCDONALD’S APP
The McDonald’s app is the first restaurant-specific one I installed on my phone. I wrote 400 words about how I love 99 cent coffee and fresh breakfast burritos before abandoning this one.
There were many more drafts that hit the trash pile this morning, most of which were half-baked ideas that didn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t even tell what some of them were going to be about. The fun thing about doing this each year is finding those blog posts that were almost finished and still hold up. There are definitely a handful that will get recycled into new posts here. Blog housekeeping, who knew that would be a thing!
We’re six full days into the first month of our No Buy Year and so far things are going great. We haven’t bought anything at a store, we haven’t visited any thrift stores, and we haven’t purchased anything from Amazon. That last one has been the hardest for me. Due to purchases made in 2024, we still had a few packages arrive after the New Year. The number has trickled down to zero. I’m pretty sure our neighborhood Amazon delivery drivers think we’re dead.
And of course we’re still spending money. We’ve already been to Walgreens twice to pick up medications, and yesterday Susan swung into Walmart to pick up ingredients to make a pot of chili to fight off the incoming cold weather. The charge for renewing my Ninjas and Neon domain went through on the first. We’ve spent a little, but nothing that breaks our goal of acquiring more clutter.
BUT, my friends… I believe I have found a loophole. The agreement between Susan and I states that we won’t buy anything from thrift stores, antique malls, or garage sales. BUY. It doesn’t say anything about getting things for free.
The first Monday of every month on my side of town is Bulk Trash Pickup Day. Anything and everything that’s too large to fit in our big blue trash bins and meets the city’s list of requirements (no batteries, no refrigerators, no bodies…) can be dragged out to the curb, where it will be picked up for free.
Which makes the weekend before an absolutely great weekend to drive around and potentially discover some treasure other people may have sat out by the curb!
(Hey — I’m not buying it, right?)
Now, I realize this qualifies as a Spirit of the Problem Violation — our whole goal is to not keep acquiring “stuff” in 2025, and I never really pick stuff out of other people’s garbage to drag home, but in a weird kind of way it was almost like window shopping. We saw shelves, we saw kitchen appliances, and we even saw this large flat screen television laying by the curb. That last one was tempting.
If you recall, last month I sat my old 55″ television out for big trash pickup. When these things break there really is no repairing them. I’m sure the owner of the television I saw ran into a similar malfunction. And it didn’t occur to me until this very moment that it’s possible that’s my old television — that someone took it from my own trash pile last month in hopes that it worked or that it could be repaired. How funny would it be if people kept passing that same television around month after month on big trash pickup day? Oh, that’s funny!
And so, with only a slight tinge of regret, I left the television where we saw it. I have so many flat screen televisions that I don’t even have a place to put one. I don’t need it in any way; I just want it, because it’s a good deal. And that’s exactly the type of response we’re trying to curb.
It took me a couple of days, but I figured it out.
I love this little blog, and it’s not going anywhere. What I was and have been frustrated with is how my traditional posts get reads and comments, but the content that doesn’t quite fit, like my retro-related stuff, doesn’t seem to find an audience. The solution, of course, is to start a new project.
Yesterday I launched NinjasAndNeon.com, a site hosted on Substack. Substack is part blog and part newsletter with a small sprinkling of social media on top. It’s a perfect place for me to write posts about old toys and video games and things like that.
To be honest, not much will change around here. If you’ve enjoyed my blog here at RobOHara.com in the past, you’ll continue to enjoy it! If deep dives about Pac-Man lunchboxes or how many special effects performers were physically inside Jabba the Hutt, check out NinjasAndNeon.com.
Susan and I have agreed not to buy anything in 2025. There are so many exceptions and asterisks to our agreement that you could drive a truck through them and by the time you reach the end of this post you may wonder what we actually agreed to stop spending money on.
This concept of setting strict spending boundaries has become known as a “No Buy Year,” which is… not what it sounds like. Confusingly, a No Buy Year doesn’t mean you don’t buy anything for an entire year. Of course people have to pay their bills and buy food. Most people say that essentials and consumables are off the table. Everything else is up for debate. Most people who attempt a No Buy Year agree not to buy non-essentials, like buying shoes when you already have some. I’ll tell you right now that over the past few days I’ve watched a dozen YouTube videos by people who attempted a No Buy Year and every single one of them used different parameters. For example, some people say they will spend money to have things replaced if they break, while others say they won’t. Most people have specific items or even entire categories that are off limits. Today there are multiple variations of the No Buy Year including the Low Buy Year and the No Spend Year. It’s all semantics, really.
The reason everyone’s parameters are different is because there are multiple reasons why people attempt this personal challenge. Some people attempt it as a way to save money. Lots of people do it as a protest against consumerism. There are others who resort to a No Buy Year to break shopping addictions. Our motivation for giving it a try is pretty simple: we have too much stuff. Our house, our garage, and even my workshop are filled to the brim. We need to take a break from bringing more things into the house while parting with some of what we have.
Because most New Year’s resolutions fail within the first month or two, Susan and I have decided to commit to this for the month of January. Our goal is to do it all year long, but agreeing to a month at a time seems more doable.
Shortly before the new year arrived, Susan and I sat down to make our lists of what we would and would not be spending money on in January.
Things we will be spending money on in January include all basic living expenses (mortgage, utilities, food, and medical expenses). That includes home maintenance, like pool supplies if needed. Also, anything that has already been bought and paid for but hasn’t arrived yet is okay. We may spend money associated with selling items online (packing material or shipping). Additionally, we agreed to a “no stockpiling” rule — no making a massive Amazon order at two minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Here are the things we will not be spending money on in January:
— Items for our toy booth (we have plenty of stock in the garage to sell.
— Clothes and shoes (we have plenty).
— No Amazon, eBay, thrifting, or garage sales.
— Gifts need to be experiences, not “things”.
— No physical media (use the library for books).
— No house holiday decorations.
— No gambling/casinos.
In addition to this, we plan to add some decluttering component to this. We’ll either be selling some stuff or donating some stuff. We haven’t worked out the details yet.
Most people who attempt a No Buy Year agree that bartering is acceptable in the event something breaks, but the thought of that makes me so uncomfortable that I can’t see me doing that. The one restriction on the list Susan and I will both have a problem with is the gift giving. We may end up changing to to set limits or something.
Many of the YouTubers I watched had financial motivations and took additional steps like unsubscribing from all pay services. Our focus is about acquiring less physical items and so that’s not really an issue for us.
As a part of this experiment we plan to track every single penny we spend throughout the month. That will be interesting to review at the end of the month. Hopefully by the end of January we can review how things went and do it again in February. We are planning to capture our attempt in some fashion — maybe a book, maybe a podcast, maybe a series of YouTube videos, maybe all of the above — so stay tuned for more updates!
Since 2016 I have been tracking all the movies, documentaries, and television shows I’ve watched. In 2023 I had a total of 85 entries. In 2021, I had a whopping 168.
In 2024, my list has a paltry 22 entries. What happened?
Well, two things. First, it is true that I watched significantly fewer movies, documentaries, and seasons of television shows in 2024. This past year I dove into YouTube and spent a lot of time both watching and making videos. Watching videos on YouTube isn’t the same as watching a movie, but it fills the same time slot. I used to put on a movie in the morning while writing blog posts or sipping my coffee, and now I watch YouTube videos. I also spent a ton of time making YouTube videos, podcasts, and doing live streams. All that requires focused computer time which doesn’t allow for movies to be playing.
The other problem is that I’ve grown tired of the method I use to track what I’ve watched. I’ve been using a Google Spreadsheet which requires me to be at the computer to use. It’s slightly cumbersome on the computer and nearly impossible on the phone. I know there are online systems that could make this easier and I may look into them for next year. At a minimum, I’m going to streamline my spreadsheet to make things simpler to track. Because of my current system, a lot of the things I watched simply didn’t get recorded.
Because of that, this year’s summary will seem a bit sparce and chintzy. I’ll do better in 2025.
MOVIES
There weren’t a lot of new movies that made an impression on me in 2024. We saw Joker: Folie a Deux which, despite getting globally negative reviews, I kind of liked. I suspect the less you know or care about “Batman canon”, the more likely you were to enjoy (perhaps “appreciate” is a better word) the film. We watched Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in the theater which was enjoyable. I also enjoyed Adam Sandler’s Spaceman, which I wasn’t sure I would. Susan and I watched Wonka and… it wasn’t for us. The oldest film I watched in 2024 was 1922’s Nosferatu. I’ve yet to see the new one, but plan to soon. The movie I was looking forward to the most last year was The Wild Robot, which didn’t meet my expectations.
The first movie I saw in 2024 was Dream Sequence, a strange movie starring Nicolas Cage. The last one I saw was Dear Santa, a film in which a young boy with dyslexia accidentally addresses his Christmas letter to Satan instead of Santa. A great premise wasted on a dumb film.
In 2024 I tried watching a few films from the 80s that I had never seen before, including St. Elmo’s Fire (1984) and Fright Night (1985). One of my favorite discoveries was The Man from Hong Kong, an Australian/Hong Kong film that was more fun to watch than many of 2024’s Hollywood blockbusters.
TELEVISION
In 2024 I only watched a couple of television shows. Susan and I discovered and binged Ted Lasso, which we loved. I also watched The Acolyte and boy, was it bad. My buddy Sean talked me into waching Fallout and despite never playing the game, really enjoyed the show.
In a large lot of DVDs I acquired the entire run of the 1970s show, Emergency! I had never heard of the show before and while I didn’t come close to watching all seven seasons, I watched multiple episodes and will watch more of it in the 2025. Through a different venture I (re)discovered the old Thunderbirds television show and again while I did not watch the entire series, I watched several episodes and liked it.
As always, I watched lots of Unsolved Mysteries and random shows related to tiny houses.
DOCUMENTARIES
I always have and always will enjoy watching documentaries. This year I watched Will and Harper, which I found very touching. The documentary I was looking forward to more than any other was BRATS, Andrew McCarthy’s documentary about the brat pack which was okay but seemed to be digging for some sort of emotional baggage that the rest of the world simply never saw. The surprise hit of the year was 2023’s They Called Him Mostly Harmless which I highly recommend and would never spoil for anyone.
I watched a couple of docuseries this year. One was This is the Zodiac Speaking, which… I mean I’ll watch anything regarding the Zodiac Killer, and this was interesting, but it really lacked a smoking gun (no pun intended). I also watched Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV which was the Dan Schneider/Nickelodeon documentary. Somehow it was more depressing than the docuseries about a serial killer.
SUMMARY
Multiple writing professors I’ve had in the past spoke of “refilling the well” — that is, consuming content in order to help us create more content. I was so busy in 2024 creating content that I didn’t set aside enough time to consume as much as I would like. In 2025 I plan to watch at least two movies a week to achieve 100 movies in 2024. There are so, so many classic films I’ve yet to see and my list is constantly growing.
Every year, between Christmas and New Year’s, I write a series of posts reflecting on the previous year. To do this, I typically scan through my blog to jog my memory. What I found this year is that… I kind of abandoned my blog.
One reason I quit writing so many blog posts is because I ran out of things to say. When I started blogging — we’re going all the way back to the late 90s, early 00s here — anything and everything qualified as a blog post. Funny exchange at the McDonald’s drive-thru? Blog post! Saw a traffic accident? Blog post! As time went on, I decided that I wanted to have something to say in my posts. I didn’t want them to be dry recordings of events like some sort of court ledger; I wanted to tell stories and be creative and even when writing about, say, Thanksgiving, I wanted to write something that had a little deeper meaning. After a couple of decades, I ran out of interesting things to say. This year for Thanksgiving, everyone who was invited showed up, the food was delicious, we all had a great time, and everybody went home. The end.
Unfortunately and perhaps sadly, it’s often easier to share those things through social media. I saw a killer sunset last night. I took a great picture of it and literally had nothing to say about it and so I posted it on Facebook. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to drop pictures and those disposable events that happen at McDonald’s drive-thrus. It’s a great place to say something when you have nothing to say.
Over the past several years people have moved away from blogs — both writing them and reading them. Writing 1,000 words about a trip to the zoo or a particularly delicious slice of pizza is one thing; getting someone to read those words is a different challenge. There are many reasons for this. One is because of the amount of content available to us today. We have news apps that take all the news from all the other news sites and summarize them because there’s so much news. Believe it or not, finding interesting and free things to read on the internet was once a challenge. Today, if I click on a web article and it takes more than two seconds to load, I close it and move to the next one. There’s no value to any one article because there are millions more waiting in the chute. All of this stuff is being pushed down our throats, and unless I’m screaming about my blog a hundred times a day, it all gets lost. In a world where Beyonce has a blog, it’s tough to get people to read about why I like ice cream.
The shift in how and where content is consumed has been pretty obvious if you’re a writer. The future is here. I would say I can listen to any album imaginable with the touch of a button, but I no longer need to touch a button to do so. There are so many great podcasts available today that if I only listened to the first minute of each one, I still wouldn’t have enough time in a single day to hear them all. We live in a world where I can stream nearly any movie or television show imaginable to my phone while riding i the car. That’s tough for a blog to compete with. People want bite-sized chunks of entertainment. People don’t want to spend an hour reading; they want to watch celebrities getting interviewed while eating increasingly spicy hot wings.
Google recent articles about blogging and you’ll find two types. Half of them have doomsday, clickbait headlines like “Is Blogging Dead?” and “Why Are People Still Blogging?” The rest of the articles (the majority, in fact) are about how to monetize your blog — how to “brand your content” and how to write blog posts that lead to sales. The type of blogging I do isn’t even on the radar anymore. It’s not even considered quaint. It just seems old.
If this sounds increasingly sour or spicy (the post, not the hot wings), I don’t mean it to. There are changes I could make and things I could do differently that, if all of this were a business, I would do immediately. What do you do when nobody wants the stuff you like to make? They say you can either change with the times or get rolled over. I’m having a tough time choosing between the two options.
This morning, as I log into WordPress, I see a bunch of errors at the top of my screen. Some obscure plug-in has failed. Again. I’ve said this before, but the more I am required to work with computers, the less I enjoy working on them. There was a time when nothing sounded more fun than tearing apart a computer and adding some RAM or upgrading a video card, and today that sounds awful. I come here to write, not to troubleshoot plug-ins and do upgrades and check for security patches and all the other nonsense that comes with maintaining a website. Maybe it’s me this morning.
Where does that leave me in 2025? I’m not sure. I’m having a good time dabbling on YouTube and I will always write because I love words. This blog post was starting to sound like the end of something but maybe it’s the beginning of something else. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.
In the meantime, here are the rolls we had for Thanksgiving. They were tasty.
It all started with our neighbors — and it wasn’t even a Christmas display, it was their Halloween decorations. On Halloween Susan and I like to sit on the front porch and hand out candy to trick-ot-treaters. We love seeing all the costumes and hearing the kids laugh and shout “TRICK OR TREAT!” when they run up to the porch. This year, all of our young visitors asked us the same question. “Did you see the Beetlejuice house?”
We had a lot going on this year and didn’t decorate as much as usual. We put Mick Rib (my 6′ skeleton) and Slimer (from Ghostbusters) on the front porch, but that was about it. We didn’t have time to reassemble our 12′ skeleton and we didn’t put up any lights. We didn’t go all out. The people across the street, however, went all out. The house is on a corner and from our porch we couldn’t see everything they had put out, but we could see enough. There was a giant sand worm from Beetlejuice in their front yard. There were flashing lights and loud music. We had been bested, and I don’t like being bested.
“Just say the word,” Susan said, “and our yard will beat theirs for Christmas.”
I don’t think I said a word and I don’t think she was really waiting for me to. Within a week or two, box after box coverer in Chinese writing began arriving from Temu. Sure, Hobby Lobby, Home Depot, and all the big stores have Christmas decorations, but Temu sells them for pennies on the dollar. For just a couple of bucks you can purchase rows of plastic candy canes. For five bucks you can get strands of lights that will stretch all the way across your yard.
Susan spent about $300. I believe the term she used was, “we’re going Griswold.”
That’s how we ended up with a yard full of lights, candy canes, Christmas-themed signs, and three large inflatable gingerbread men. There’s the large one relaxing in the front yard, the ninja-themed one performing a flying karate kick near my office window… and then there’s Ginger McHoleHead, a 10′ tall gingerbread man guarding the entrance to our home. 10-foot-tall is just an estimate — the top of his head comes to the top of our gutter, and his top hat extends several feet above that.
Ginger McHoleHead likes (er, liked) to dance in the Oklahoma wind. He came with a variety of plastic stakes, none of which were able to withstand Oklahoma’s wind gusts. We ended up strapping him to one of our porch posts, which kept his belly affixed to the house but allowed his arms and legs to flop around as if he were trying to escape this house of holiday horrors.
Ginger McHoleHead was so large that he blocked our view of the street from the living room. The morning I noticed sunlight coming in the front windows again, I knew something had gone horribly wrong.
The paper-thin nylon this thing from Temu was made with did its best to hang on, but the Oklahoma winds proved too much for him. Either by accident or some form of sick holiday protest, Ginger McHoleHead flung his head down to the ground and ripped a hole in his own head on one of the ground spikes. While his original name was Ginger McHappyHat, this is when he was rechristened Ginger McHoleHead.
Ginger McHoleHead’s fan is still running in an act of futile defiance. On a good day his leg will inflate almost up to the knee, but other than that, he s a goner. If anybody really tall is looking for a Halloween costume next year, I’ll make you a heck of a deal on one.
And so, for now, his icing-covered brethren look on. The other two remain inflated but are secretly hoping for Christmas to hurry up and arrive so that they might make it to the attic and live to inflate another day.
Yesterday, I placed a large flat screen television out in the trash. It is, as far as I can recall, the first time I have ever literally thrown away a flat screen television.
The television was a 55″ model made by Visio — perhaps not the world’s greatest brand, but a decent brand as far as I am concerned. When Susan rented her condo space in Washington D.C. a couple of years ago she needed a television the living room and asked for some advice. I suggested going to Sam’s Club (who would deliver the television) and pick the largest one you could find for less than $400.
In an previous post I detailed how, after 13 months of ownership, the TV developed a problem with its display. This was not caued by overuse or abuse. If I had to estimate, in the 13 months we owned it we probably turned it on less than a dozen times. When we moved it back to Oklahoma from Washington D.C., it was repackaged in its original box surrounded by the original packing material. Despite all of that, something inside the TV malfunctioned and the screen began displaying static across the lower portion of the screen — not so much as to make it unwatchable, but more than a TV (especially one that was barely a year old) should show.
I contacted Visio and after providing some pictures and performing some remote troubleshooting, it was determined that yes, the TV was broken. and, more importantly, it was still under warranty. Visio mailed me a check for the price of the television and told me to keep the TV. Of course, a $400 TV with a bit of static at the bottom seems like the end of the world, but a now-free TV with a minor glitch seemed like something I could live with, and so I did for a few months.
That is, until last month when I turned on the television and discovered that the entire system was wrecked. It was as if the television would draw pixels to display pictures, but never undraw them. Within just a few seconds, the entire screen would be filled with a gigantic smear of lights and lines and colors — great if you’re into pop art, but pretty useless if you want to watch TV.
The solution came in the form of a Black Friday sale. Best Buy had a TCL 55″ flatscreen television on sale for $188. I think TCL is on par with Visio. It cost half as much as the one it replaced and was half the weight. After turning on the TCL television I was forced to login using my Amazon account (the options were to do that, or be limited to a limited set of features with no access to the app store). By the time I had jumped through all the required hoops including scanning for stations using my digital TV antenna and setting up all my apps (Plex, Pluto, Tubi) it’s possible I spent more time working on this television than I spent watching the last one.
That left me with one final dilemma… what to do with the old TV. These things are not really designed to be worked on, and I’m not sure who would even do it. It’s certainly beyond my technical skillset. None of my local “icanfixit” friends wanted it. With Facebook Marketplace full of $100 used 55″ televisions and new ones costing $188, a completely broken one doesn’t have much value.
And so, with little pomp and circumstance and less dignity, the television was placed by the curb for big trash pickup and recycling, next to a refrigerator that died and the recliner that broke. The whole pile is being monitored by a grinning inflatable gingerbread man from Temu, too dumb to know someday he’ll be in their shoes. In the old days an old CRT television placed by the curb there was always a chance that a neighborhood kid or a local scavenger would snatch it up before it made its way to the dump, but I don’t suspect anyone will rescue this one.
Two houses ago, I purchased my very first flatscreen television. The technology seemed like a miracle from the future at the time. It seemed unbelievable that I owned a television that could be hung on the wall. Roughly 20 years later, it seems just as unbelievable that I would be setting one out by the curb as trash.
I recently built a large shelving system for tubs in my garage using only 2x4s. Here is a link to my YouTube video showing exactly how it’s done, followed by a written summary of the process. This is the sturdiest and simplest method I have come up with for adding storage to your garage. If you can cut a 2×4 and use a drill, you can build these.
It’s no secret that I love shelves. I love building them and I love putting stuff on them.
When we moved into this house six years ago, I purchased a large amount of Rubbermaid storage tubs to transport and store my large collection of (mostly Star Wars) toys. In our last house I had a dedicated room for my toy display and in this house, I don’t. A lot of the tubs remain in the garage, unopened. I have been slowly parting with some of the toys I only like which is freeing up space in my office for the things I love, but the process is so low on my list of priorities that I fear it may not happen in my lifetime.
The problem with the tubs I purchased is that they don’t hold up to stacking heavier tubs on top. Many of the tubs are starting to cave in, causing the stacks to lean and occasionally topple over. Combine this with all the sourcing Susan has been doing for our toy booth and online sales and I decided a new massive set of garage shelves were in order.
Many years ago I came up with a simple system for building garage shelves that are perfect for storing tubs. My method is super simple. The shelves are made completely from 2x4s and only feature 90-degree cuts. If you can cut a 2×4 and work a drill, you can build these.
Again, I only use 2x4s to build these shelves. Believe it or not, you can easily fit 2x4s in a Ford Flex with the middle seat folded down (and the passenger seat leaned forward just a tad bit…). I am not good at “lumber math” so I bought 24 2x4s which I knew would not be enough, but would be enough to get me started. I built a very similar set of these shelves in a previous home and noted in that article that the 2x4s cost $2/each in 2004. In 2024, I paid $3.50.
Here is how I construct each individual shelf. Every shelf is a rectangular box with one 2×4 on each side and two additional 2x4s in the middle. This shelf is 2′ deep and 3′ side. This is a very cost-effective size because 2x4s are 8′ long, which means you can cut each one into three pieces (two 3′ pieces and one 2′ piece) and build the entire shelf out of two 2x4s. If you’re doing the math, that means each shelf this size costs $7.
The way I build these is very simple. Before starting, I cut a small block of wood that is exactly 6″ wide. That piece of wood is going to be my spacer. After cutting all the other 2x4s to lenghth, I laid the four 3′ pieces parallel and put one 2′ piece on the end. I then drove two 3″ screws into the end of each 2×4. Instead of using a measuring tape I used the 6″ block of wood to keep everything spaced evenly. In other words I screwed the first one onto the end, then put the block in place to line up the second one, screwed that one in place, and worked my way all the way down to the last 2×4. When one side was finished I flipped the whole thing over and did the other side, making sure to start on the same end as before just to make sure all the 2x4s were lined up.
If you watch the video you’ll notice that I started with 2″ long drywall screws, which I quickly determined were not long enough. Driving them through a 2×4 only leaves you 1/2″ of “grip” into the second 2×4, which just isn’t enough. I quickly changed to 3″ screws, and doubled back and drove 3″ screws into all the other joints just to make sure everything was strong.
Once you have a few of these shelves built it’s time to start assembling them.
Again, the key to my system is using spacers. I don’t want to be using a tape measure for every single shelf and even if I did none of them would turn out level. Instead, here is what I do. First, find the biggest “whatever” that you’re going to be putting on your shelves. For these I’ll be putting storage tubs, but I’ve used this same technique to make shelves for CDs and DVDs, too. With your spacer (in this case, a tub) in place, put something on top of the spacer to ensure there’s a gap above it to make things easier to remove. In my case, I used two 2x4s standing on end, one on each end of the tub. With that set up, I then place a shelf on top of that, make sure that it is level, and start screwing the shelf into place. In the above picture (in which I’m installing the second shelf from the ground), I screwed both sides touching the wall into studs. On the outside corner of the shelf I’ve attached a vertical 2×4 and overlapped it so that one half of it is covering the front of the shelf. (We’ll use the other half for the next set of shelves.)
Phone cameras and lenses can be weird so trust me when I say these are more level than they look. Here I’ve added a third shelf. Note I’m using the same technique over and over. Put the tub on the previous shelf, put a couple of spacers on top of the tub, place the next shelf on top of that and then attach it to the studs in the wall and finally the 2×4 in the front corner.
This wall presented some unique challenges, the biggest one being two windows. Had I built another 3′ wide shelf, the end would have landed right in the middle of the window and not given me any place along the wall to anchor it — so I built the next set of shelves to be 6′ wide instead of 3′. This allowed me to attach them to studs on both sides of the window, assuring their strength.
Eagle-eyed readers may noticed I switched tubs. Halfway through the first set of shelves I realized that this green tub was taller than the other one I was using and I wanted to make sure every shelf could hold any tub, so I readjusted the other shelves and switched to this green tub.
Again it really is this simple. Here I’m putting the third (counting up from the bottom) 6′ shelf into place. After building a few out in the driveway I would drag them inside and install a few.
That’s all there is to it! Rinse and repeat until you run out of lumber or run out of wall!
I read on the internet (so it must be true!) that a 2×4 laying flat lenghwise can support 100 pounds, when turned on its side can support 1,000 pounds, and vertically can hold 10,000 pounds. None of these tubs come anywhere near 100 pounds in weight and as you can see, on the 6′ section I am only able to get 4 tubs so there is no way these 2x4s will ever bend from the weight. Not only do the additional 2x4s down the middle of each shelf section add additional weight support, but doing it this way is much less expensive and time consuming than buying a sheet of plywood and cutting it to fit on top of each shelf.
Pro-tip: I didn’t pre-measure how high to make the vertical 2x4s. After the top shelves went on I used a circular saw and chopped them off to be level with the highest shelf.
If you want to turn one of the bays into a temporary shelf, you can easily do it with just a cardboard box folded flat. With all the 2x4s the cardboard won’t sag. I like doing this because I can always pull it back out and make room for more tubs if needed.
Here is the finished product. The spacing worked out so that I repeated everything twice. Starting at the back corner there’s a 3′ wide section, a 6′ section, another 3′, and another 6′. That’s 18′ in all, plus a 2×4 sideways on the end of each one that adds 3″ (1 1/2″ on each side) for a total length of 19′. My garage is just over 20′ deep, which gives me some space on the end for shovels, brooms and rakes.
You may notice in the above picture that the shelves “stairstep” down a bit — that was to make room for the garage door rails. Again there is not hard set rule as to how high you can make these or how long each section can be.
I hadn’t actually put a pencil to the project to see what it actually cost me, so let’s do that. If a 2×4 currently costs $3.50, that calculates to 43.75 cents a foot — we’ll round up to 45 cents to include tax. After looking at the pictures, here’s what I count:
Seven 6′ shelves with four 2x4s each: (7*6*4 * .45 = $75)
Seven 3′ shelves with four 2x4s each: (7*3*4 * .45 = $38)
Fourteen 2′ end pieces: (14*2 * .45 = $13)
That puts us at $126, so with a few bucks worth of wood screws let’s call it $130. I’m not counting the tools I used.
The closest thing I can find on Home Depot’s website are their yellow steel garage storage shelves, which come with four shelves (one on the ground level) and are 2′ deep (like these), 6′ tall (shorter than these, and provide four shelves. They cost $319 right now (on sale), and you could need at least three sets of them. And if you want to really compare apples to apples, my shelves give me approximately 86′ of shelf storage space for $130. Those Home Depot shelves cost roughly $8.50/foot, so to get the same amount of storage space it would cost you nearly $750. Clearly the shelves I built took a little more effort, but I was able to build them over a weekend, customize the shape and size to take advantage of the space I had available, and save a ton of money in the process.
I am super happy with how these turned out. They cleaned up this entire half of the garage and allow me access to all my tubs!
The Adventures of Rob, Susan, Mason and Morgan O'Hara
