Projects

I took care of two little projects last weekend, and here comes another weekend, and I never wrote about them because this week turned out to be a little crazy. I worked 46.5 hours, which seemed disappointingly low when I actually added it up because I FELT like I was chained to my desk for five days straight. I don’t understand how people can work 80+ hour weeks because I think that would drive me insane within a month. I definitely appreciate the fact that my job is a nice, neat 40 hours per week most of the time.

Anyway, last weekend there were actually supposed to be THREE projects, but one of them is proving to be much more difficult than anticipated. This is why I always talk about hiring people to do things to my house instead of trying to DIY — because I often fail at what seems to be a simple project. But more on that in a minute.

First, I revamped my jewelry frame. I originally put it together a couple weeks ago with the image above (seen on Pinterest) as inspiration. But I didn’t think through the fact that a couple horizontal wires wouldn’t work very well for necklaces.

Last weekend, I happened to see some cork tiles at Lowe’s and decided that would work much better. I pulled out the wires, framed the cork panels, and used some wooden thumbtacks I already had to arrange my necklaces. I’m a lot happier with the result, and now I can see my more frequently worn jewelry at a glance.

(Not our bathroom)

Second, I dragged Jose to Lowe’s to buy a simple floating shelf to hang along the back wall of the “toilet room” in our master bathroom after seeing the photo above on Pinterest last week. It was just the thing we needed to get our extra rolls of toilet paper and other stuff off the floor. We only put up a single shelf, and it’s working great. I almost took a picture to show you, but then decided that I didn’t want to take a picture of our toilet. The random toilet above is enough.

While we were at Lowe’s, I had the brilliant idea for the third project: installing swing-arm reading lamps on either side of our bed. They had a nice-looking lamp for the reasonable sum of $40, so we bought two and headed home. We didn’t install them on Sunday or Monday because we were busy, but on Tuesday I decided to knock them both out. An hour later, we only had one of the two lamps installed, and it wasn’t really functional yet. Here’s the list of issues:

1. The toggle bolts required LARGE holes in the wall. Larger than our 3/8″ drill bit, which is the largest bit we have. (We ended up using that drill bit and carefully rotating the drill to enlarge the hole enough to force the toggle bolts through.)
2. While installing the lamp onto the backplate, screwing on the knobs on the outside kept causing the bolts on the inside to loosen. (It took three tries but we finally got it.)
3. The cord cover wouldn’t stay fully screwed into the lamp base. (We couldn’t fix this one, but it’s good enough that it’s not noticeable.)
4. We didn’t have any light bulbs short enough to fit under the “harp.”

It seemed ridiculous to go out to buy light bulbs at 9 pm, so we couldn’t fix the last issue. And after all that, we didn’t feel like messing with the second lamp. Jose got a light bulb on Wednesday so one lamp is finally complete, but we still haven’t installed the second one so it goes on the project list for this weekend, I guess.

Our house has the most random issues with light bulbs. All of the fixtures take a weird bulb base that Lowe’s and Home Depot don’t even carry — I have to order them online. So I suppose it’s par for the course that we ended up with a lamp that also didn’t take the normal-sized bulbs we already had. I suppose this is what you get with a $40 lamp, but I hoped for better.