Hasta La Ideas

I’ve got a thing for tool storage, which directly reflects my organizational failings in other areas of my life: I have no hope I’ll ever be able to tame my desk, kitchen, refrigerator, bathroom, bedroom, or closet like those neat photos I see in the design magazines–my own are simply too idiosyncratic–but I still have hope in the tool department. There are established systems for organizing tool collections no matter what their content is, and with the right system they require only a little discipline to keep things in place.

Here I’m going to take a look at three ways people keep tools organized. Is there a metaphor in here for how to keep the rest of your life in neat little rows? You decide.

A board with holes in it will not protect you from leprosy, but will keep your hammers in place.

If you believe Wikipedia, pegboard was invented in 1897 by a doctor seeking a way to prevent lepers from spreading the disease. (It almost sounds like a Monty Python sketch where they had limited props and five minutes until air time.) Whatever its provenance, pegboard is the most basic way to store and organize tools and has found its way into countless shops for its obvious utility.

The first benefit of pegboard is obvious–it allows you to see everything in your collection at once.

But depending on how good your eye is at making sense of chaos a pegboard system may only be slightly more efficient than rooting around in a drawer. Pegboard is basically a physical version of having files scattered all over your computer’s desktop; some people find it disgusting, others find it efficient and beautifully organic:

(more…)