Tea Wreath

If I was an architect, the world would have a whole lot more Leaning Tower of Pisas.

I bow down to Kirsten of Kojo Designs, because her tutorial was so clear and straightforward I actually managed to make it without once screeching “WHAT? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?”. Unfortunately, the side of the cupboard was a little too small – I categorically refuse to confess that the wreath was a little too big.It's lucky I just made this because it was pretty, not because I actually drink tea.

Plate Proverbs

Everybody who’s ever watched Play School knows that it’s important to have a theme, and plates and kitchens go together like, well, plates and kitchens. I’ve seen some amazing plate wall arrangements, but I wanted mine to make a more literal statement. They glare down from their lofty perch, warning of the dire consequences to come if you eat that third piece of sticky toffee pudding with cream on top.

                                                                                      

I tried writing on them with a porcelain marker, but it didn’t ‘pop’ enough, so I went to Plan B (sadly, Plan B became a recurring theme of this project). If I had the patience of Job and a spare decade or two, I would have cut the letters out individually, but since I have neither I hacked them into strips and glued the whole thing on with Mod Podge.

Using the tutorial for hanging with paperclips from In My Own Style, I tried roughing the gluing-spot up with sandpaper as advised, but they resolutely refused to oblige, perhaps because they were imported from the tip shop rather than from China. I went ahead and smothered them with hot glue anyway, and hung them on the wall. Whether it was the type of glue or the type of plates I don’t know, but they lasted even less long than Francis Michael Forde did in office – one night, in fact, and they went down fighting.

All I can say is that my first reaction was not “Oh, bliss, what a terribly exciting opportunity to learn how to replace a tile”.

But now that they had smashed up my kitchen, I was even more determined to have something to show for it, so I found a different tutorial from Attempting to Be Domestic for hanging plates, with wire this time. I tried it with a clothes hanger just because they’re cheap, but as I am neither the Incredible Hulk nor a rampant steroid abuser, it didn’t work. It was vastly more successful with 18-gauge wire, but I must have been doing something backwards, because for the plates to hang properly my frames had to be upside down. I blame it on being left-handed.

And yes, one of the plates is hanging from a panda bear suction cap, since that was all I had. Don’t judge me.

Pot Rack

Our kitchen cupboards would make Martha Stewart weep tears of despair. Hell, they’d make Ozzy Osbourne weep tears of despair. They were like one of those cartoons where the kid’s mother opens his bedroom closet and an avalanche of toys come flooding out. I really wanted one of those old-bed-frame-hanging-from-the-ceiling pot racks, but given our real estate agent’s strong feelings about Blu-tac, I suspect she wouldn’t be handing out lollipops for hooks in the ceiling. I went to the tip shop with $5 in my pocket, and as usual it obliged.

I didn’t bother taking a proper ‘before’ photo, since I was fairly certain there’d be nothing that would warrant an ‘after’ photo anyway.

This is why I don’t measure things: because even when I do, I still get it home and discover it’s THREE CENTIMETRES TOO WIDE. We ended up tearing the entire thing apart with a crowbar and a very large hammer, sawing a few centimetres off the shelves and rebuilding it, which also allowed me to pick the heights of the shelves to suit the implements. 

The advantage of having torn the side off was having extra bits of wood, so I measured and sawed them to the length between two of the shelves and nailed them in as cooking-tray dividers. I placed the cup hooks through the technical method of holding the pot approximately where I wanted it, marking the spot with pencil and screwing the hook in. I also put three on the side facing the oven so I wouldn't have to wrestle with the drawers every time I wanted a spatula, which often literally do not open because they're so crammed with every half-melted kitchen implement my mother no longer wanted.

The pot lids are sitting in some kind of plate drainer, but balancing them in there is like playing a particularly delicate game of Jenga, so eventually I’ll have to find something wider. The back of the rack has no bracing: it’s sandwiched in so tightly it doesn’t matter, but if it was standing alone, it’d crumble like a nail-studded pack of cards.

The first time we dragged it into the kitchen, we discovered that we couldn’t actually open the kitchen cupboard to the left of it. I cheerfully declared that we could drink from Tupperware containers from now on, but Lawrence suspected my housemates wouldn’t share the sentiment, so we dragged it back out and hacked off most of the uprights of the top left shelf. The part that remains used to hold our mixing bowl, back in the happy days when we actually had one.

Martha Stewart can now redirect her wrath to the hideous 1950s browny-yellow shagpile carpet in the living room.