“There has to be a better way.”

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That thought has been a constant refrain for Jim Lindsley, founder and owner of PunchList HandiWorks, for most of his life. Whenever a repetitive task seems to be harder to do than it should be, Jim doesn’t accept it. He heads back to the drawing board, determined to make it simpler, smarter, and more efficient.

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Tell Jim, “You can’t do that,” and his first response is, “Are you sure? Why not?”

Back in his late 30s, Jim was working part-time installing siding to supplement his full-time job. When he asked for weekend hours, he was told “no one else wants to work weekends, and you can’t install siding by yourself". Jim had a different idea.

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That weekend, he created two tools of his own design.

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The following weekend, he showed up at a job site ready to prove a point. One tool hooked onto an installed course of siding and supported one end of a new 12-foot slat at exactly the right spacing. The second tool, held in his left hand, aligned the opposite end and held a nail in place while his right hand swung the hammer, this was before affordable pneumatic nail guns, after all.

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The result? A one-man siding system that worked. And plenty of weekend hours followed.

 

Years later, that same mindset sparked again when Jim saw a fellow senior citizen struggling to load groceries into a minivan with two young kids in tow. Jim stepped in to help but more importantly, the idea followed him home.

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“There has to be a better way.”

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Soon after, the PunchList HandiWorks Cargo Drawer was born, designed to make loading & unloading minivans and SUVs much quicker and easier – and without any back strain.

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For Jim, thinking outside the box isn’t a strategy. It’s simply how he sees the world.

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Not long after the Cargo Drawer came the Lumber Lugger.

 

Jim was replacing his 30+ year old decks and some 4-foot by 8-foot siding panels behind his house. The supplier could only unload tons of large materials [12-foot-long lumber and the siding panels] in front of his house due to the narrowness of the driveway. It was either ‘lug the materials about 120 feet back to the work-site’ <<or>> ‘carry them one or two items at a time by himself’. But that quickly changed after the first 3 trips of what would have been about 80 trips – many hours. There had to be a better way.

 

Instead of continuing, Jim tarped the remaining materials out front, went to the drawing board, and the Lumber Lugger was born. In 14 easy trips Jim moved the materials back to the work site in half an hour.