Sometimes, progress doesn’t mean pushing forward — it means taking a step back to reset and refocus.

The past few months (since August, to be specific) have been a roller coaster of emotions, especially when it comes to building the layout. I’ve been doing some reflection on this over the past week or so and thought I’d share more about it.

In early August, southeast Wisconsin was hit with a tremendous amount of rain in a very short amount of time — about 14" in roughly 16 hours, depending on the exact area. This obviously caused a significant amount of damage across the region, and unfortunately, our less-than-one-year-old finished basement was one of the many victim basements that took on water. Note: I am not soliciting feedback or advice on how to prevent this — we added preventative measures when we built the house and are adding more now.

Since the flooding, we’ve been diligently working on cleanup and repairs and are now very close to having everything finished (special thanks to our families for their help!).

While most of the manual effort is now behind us, it has still been an emotional roller coaster. That has spilled over into my layout work, which has always been an “escape” for me from the daily grind. Thankfully, I’ve started finding ways to make forward progress again, even though many areas of our house — including my layout room, shop area, and basement — still feel like they’re in disarray.

The silver lining of this mess is that I was able to take the opportunity to have the layout floor leveled and changed to LVP from carpeting (I thought carpet was a good idea).

Late last week, I hit a bit of a “funk” where I didn’t really want to do much anything on the layout. Part of it was the long list of house projects still waiting, but I could sense there was something deeper. After more reflection, I realized a big part of it was the general clutter and disorganization of my spaces. I was constantly looking for something instead of actually working on something. And clutter, for me, tends to create mental static — it makes it harder to focus or feel inspired.

So, for most of this week, I’ve taken a complete break from working on the actual layout and focused instead on organizing. I’ve been sorting supplies — mostly electronics and track items — into dedicated bins so they’re easy to find and grab. Much of the upper level of the layout, which had turned into random storage, has also been cleaned up. Even though the organization work isn’t done yet, it already feels so much better and has made the layout room more inviting. Hopefully, after Trainfest next week, I’ll be ready to get back to laying track.

Then it’s on to organizing my shop… ugh.

So, next time you feel like you’re in a rut and don’t want to work on the things that usually bring you joy, try a reset. Sometimes stepping back to bring order to your space is exactly what you need to move forward again.