Give Me Five Minutes More...

Those of a certain age - or younger folks that enjoy good music - will remember the tune "Give Me Five Minutes More." It's not only a great song, but it's a good mantra for making progress on your layout. I've written before (here, here & here) about how effective it is to take advantage of little bits of time to get something - anything - done on the layout, no matter how small or insignificant. Those little bits of time add up - sometimes even more so than than the much more elusive large chunks of time.

And doing those little bits has a way of warding off frustration too.  Case in point:

My busy time of year at work is finally over, but basement time is still hard to come by. Too many things got deferred while I was working late hours, and this week and next week will be busy with a 20th anniversary, a long weekend trip away, and parents visiting from way down south. All good things, to be sure, but not compatible with lots of time on the layout.

So last night I figured I'd head downstairs "for just 5 minutes or so" to see what I could accomplish. Here's what I saw...

Remnants of winter training - the physical kind, rather than the railroad kind - needed to be picked up and stored away.

The under-the-staging-yard area had become a dumping ground of miscellany - especially bad since the cardboard boxes tend to soak up any basement weeping that occasionally happens in that corner.

More winter training remnants - this shelf held my iPad for watching TrainMastersTV during workouts

The  workout/training stuff had been taking up the space that I plan for Essex/Deep River and since winter is over (yay!) and benchwork for this area is on the horizon (double yay!!), it was time for it to go. The treadmill had already been moved to the other room - I had only to put away the bike trainer and clean up.

It's already looking better! Those L-girders on the wall will support East Haddam, eventually.

All that detritus under the staging yard was really starting to get in the way and when I run the outside spigot/sprinkler, I sometimes get water in this corner. So I hunkered down and got that stuff moved out too...

Much nicer and makes it much easier to move around under there.

Finally, down came the shelf - and the rest of the wall hangings won't be too far behind since I need to paint this wall sky blue as the first step in a backdrop for East Haddam...

The turnback curve between East Haddam and Deep River will be there in the corner.

It turned out that "5 minutes" ended up being closer to 45 minutes by the time I got these little chores done, but the time spent was WAY better than the alternative - sitting in front of the TV, or worse. And I'm just that little bit closer to getting benchwork installed in the area - and consequently just that little bit further along on the layout.

So, whatever you do, don't make the mistake of thinking you don't have enough time for your layout. True, you may not have the luxury of hours at a time, but even few minutes can make a huge difference if you put enough of them together.