Settling

A couple quick peeks at what we've been up to ...

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D has been insanely busy at work, so we get very little time together lately, which has been especially hard since we normally nest hardcore after a move. I've been doing lots of little projects on my own and we were lucky to get some time on Saturday to work together and knock out some of the things on our list. We have a weird division of labor that happens in our house and I'm embarrassed to admit that I never, ever, ever hang shelves or hooks or anything on the walls. I'm just not patient enough for the entire process of measuring, leveling, etc. I hate it. It's not that I'm not handy - I like fixing things and happily spent part of Saturday taking apart our vacuum cleaner to figure out why it had stopped working, even though that took longer than the shelf hanging would have. I'm selectively impatient, I guess. Anyways ...

1. I am so lucky that D enjoys creating custom organizers for our kitchen drawers and he's done it for every place we've lived. You can only see the top layer here (and a peek at the second layer) but this is a three tier drawer organizer that holds basically all our kitchen utensils. We lay out everything, organize it by priority (most used gets top layer billing) and then he goes to work with sturdy cardboard and a hot glue gun. The finished product always amazes me. This new kitchen has a ridiculous amount of drawers, so being super efficient wasn't even really necessary, but it's still nice to have everything neatly organized. These old kitchens tend to have super deep drawers, so if you don't make organizers you're just fishing around in them.

2. The fridge is right next to the stove, and I wanted to get some use out of the space. Oddly, there aren't a lot of magnetic bar options out there, so I opted for a DIY version. This is a Grundtal rail from Ikea that I attached to the fridge using some super strong magnets. Even with the crazy magnets, this is only going to work for relatively lightweight items, but that's all I needed it for and it stays in place really well with no sliding. For extra friction, I cut small squares of nitrile from a glove (you can also use latex from a balloon) and placed it between the magnets and the fridge and the magnets and the rail attachment. I used these magnets but they are 1.75" wide which means they stick out on the edges. If I did this again, I'd probably get something a little smaller, like these 1.5" ones or these square 1.5" ones or maybe these bars, which would probably look the neatest (I might actually order these right now - I'll get back to you if they work better). EDIT - if you're thinking about doing this and using the Grundtal rail, do yourself a favor and get the bars instead of the circles. They work great and they fit so neatly. I switched mine out and love it way more now.

3. The other big project we got finished was installing a dog door for Circe (no pictures, so you'll have to accept this one of her supervising me while I clean the porch instead). She hasn't had one before so most of the weekend was spent training her that she can, in fact, go in and out at will. At this point I'm pretty sure that she is fully aware of how it works but is pretending ignorance so we'll continue to bribe her with treats.