11:06 – Barbara got home a few minutes ago from her sister’s birthday breakfast. A bit unusual, but Frances’ husband has to go in to work later this morning, so it was breakfast or nothing.
Reorganizing downstairs is proceeding apace. Last August, we went out to Home Depot looking for plastic storage bins. They had generic shoebox-sized 6.5-quart storage bins with lids for $1.17 each, so we bought 37, which was their entire stock. I was intending to buy another bunch, so I checked the website to see how many the local store had in stock. While I was there, I started looking at alternatives. They also had Sterilite plastic shoeboxes. That’s a decent brand name, but the Sterilite boxes were a lot more expensive. Then I noticed that they sold them in a 60-pack, on-line only, for $70. That item was flagged “no free shipping”, which concerned me a bit. But I added it to my cart anyway, and ended up paying only the $70 plus $5 shipping and $5 sales tax. That’s $1.33 each delivered, and they’re nicer storage bins than the no-name ones we bought before. And I don’t have to carry them home. I did check Amazon, of course. They didn’t have the 60-packs. They did have 12-packs with free shipping, but five 12-packs would have cost me $132.
When they arrive, 30 of them go downstairs on the work tables. We’ll use them to assemble batches of 30 each of the various chemical bags that go into the kits. They’ll replace the cardboard boxes we had been using. The other 30 stay upstairs, where we’ll use them to assemble batches of 30 of the small parts bags for the kits. The nice thing about these bins is that they’re stackable when not in use, which cardboard boxes are not. That means we can get them out, set up an array of 30 of them, build 30 (or 60 or 90) small parts bags, and then stack the bins out of the way.