For Norman Manweiler, there’s always a way.

“People say handicapped people can’t do nothing,” he said. “When I was 6, I remember my grandfather telling me, ‘When you get old, don’t lay down and feel sorry for yourself. Get up, get on the move.’ That’s what I tell myself.”

Despite being in a wheelchair, with one leg missing and the other foot not working properly, the Powell man stays industrious. His property is a testament to that — from the switch attached to a tree stump that powers the front yard sprinklers, to his method of getting oxygen to the garage for his daughter who often stops by to help.

Lately, Manweiler, 82, has been using that creativity — and his daughter Lisa’s proficiency with a saw — to make lawn ornaments. The wooden birds and flowers are traced and then cut, with metal staking sticks drawn from used parts. The ornaments are now dotted around his yard, in front of the wooden ramp he also built himself to access the house and other parts of the property in his powered wheelchair.

Manweiler is a nonstop picture of determination and ingenuity. When he needed a way to clear the snow from the back of his property, he simply bought a tractor, despite being told he wouldn’t be able to drive it. Yet he manages, crawling from his chair to the tractor and into the seat.

And Manweiler is not slowing down. He found a way to reuse the bottoms of old swivel chairs, and is now looking for more broken chairs (with solid bases and swivel parts) to once again create new items from discarded materials.

“I try,” he said, “to do what my grandfather said.”