Quarantine Task Jar: Installing a Tie Rack

Here's another small chore completed, thanks to the latest slip drawn from the quarantine task jar, during a rainy spell earlier this month. The photo above is of the inside of the enormous wardrobe in the master bedroom, and on the door you see ties hanging on an old string. For several years now, since my acquisition of ties exceeded the capacity of my tie rack on the inside of the master bedroom closet door, this is where I've hung the newer ones that I most often reach for on my working days. Not the best arrangement, especially because of how easily they slipped down and would get creased at the bottom of that cabinet door. For years I've had a new tie rack tucked away that I had grabbed on impulse but hadn't installed yet.

Unfortunately, once I opened the new tie rack, I found it was smaller than I had remembered. I still put it up, because it fits that narrow door well, but I decided I'd better rethink this and instead get myself a larger one.

The tie rack I've held onto for years was my father's. It has been with me everywhere I've lived since moving out of my childhood home after college: Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Charlottesville, and back to Winston-Salem.

It holds a lot of ties, but I also like that the individual hangers are hinged, so it's easy to "page" through the ties. Alas, I wasn't able to find anything similar, either in capacity or in design, and had to settle for fixed racks and lesser capacity. A speedy delivery from Amazon solved the issue and now I've got two racks on the inside of the closet door:

Those three ties proudly displayed on the upper rack, by the way, are the three I kept from my dad after he died in 1981: two great wild ones from the 70s plus a normal professional classic red tie. And the new small rack inside the wardrobe? Perfect for my small collection of rarely-worn bow ties:

On a related note: A quick check of the blog tells me that I've made only limited references to that wardrobe and have just a single picture of it from April 2004 in this dated blog post. (A more recent post on the master bedroom from Fall 2014 can be found here.)

Finally, let me note that the idea behind the quarantine task jar, which cranked up back in March with the initial shut-down orders at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, was to entice me to a measure of qualified productivity regarding tons of chores that were languishing on my grand to-do list. It really worked fantastically well to carry me through the rest of the winter and into the early spring. But with the good weather and the relative enormity of some outdoor projects, I haven't needed the discipline or incentive, and draws from the task jar have been few and far between.