Sunday, March 30, 2014

Gary Built Something Useful!

In all fairness, he builds lots of useful things.

Sooooooo, it's been a while since we posted anything. We've been busy doing a bunch of things, but I've not had the motivation for doing a blog post in a while. Oh well, life and all that.

But! We're having some family over for a week-long visit in just 6 days, and we're really excited to get our apartment in some semblance of order so it won't be completely trashed when our relatives leave. Not that they are the type to trash things, it just happens when you have a lot of people in a small, small space. We've been wanting to organize stuff for a while, but this visit has been the major push to purge a bunch of crap that's been lying around and also find systems that will be easy to maintain while they are here and after they leave. We've already done a little in the living room and it has been a LIFESAVER. It is so much easier to clean up and it takes way more time for things to get really dirty, so for someone who is a lazy cleaner like me, it has been awesome!

We are really really excited about the thing Gary made today though! We don't have a lot of seating just now, especially in the kitchen. We are going to have 9 people in our house for a week, so we need more seats for everyone to sit at the kitchen table.

Gary was over at his mum's house doing some basement work for her, and he decided to make a bench out of some "reclaimed" wood from her basement stairway to ease some of our seating woes. He just put in new stair runners, so he had all these 2x10 boards lying about just waiting to be put together into something new.

Funny thing is, when he brought it home, as excited as we were to have a bench for peeps to sit on, we won't be using it for seating forever, so I had the idea that when we were done with it, we could use it as shoe storage in our entry.

We had shoe storage already, but it looked like this:



It was just a stopgap to give us a definitive place to put shoes, not really a method that we thought was going to work. It is what it is, and what it is, is a box turned on it's end with some shoes stuck haphazardly in to it. It's rather underwhelming.

But now we have this!



We have a shoe bench! Peri insists that her shoes go on top. It has plenty of room for our shoes on the bottom shelves (or shelf and floor I guess), and then guests can put their shoes on top. Gary's bike is actually mounted to the wall right above this, so it's not really a place where we can sit and put our shoes on.

I don't really like the bike there, but there is literally no other place where it could possibly go, so I live with it. It's saving us money for Gary to go to work on bike instead of by train, and he's really, really jazzed to be getting 16 miles of exercise every day, so I deal with it.

So now we still don't have seating in our kitchen, but Gary plans to make another bench just like this one to go in our kitchen, and we'll never be lacking kitchen seating or shoe storage again.

The End.