Shoe rack on the wall

On one of the living room spring cleaning posts I mentioned that I will be making a shoe rack near the door to the terrace. At first I tried to find U-shaped piece of metal from the factory area at work, to create something like this, but I had no luck. I discarded that idea and thought that I should make something out of wood since I have experience working with wood but not with metal. I also liked the shoe rack where pairs of feet are formed from wire. I like that the rack and that the shoes take up so little horizontal space. And then I found this shoe storage item that I thought was the ugliest thing I've ever seen, but yet I think it looks very functional and versatile.

And then I thought of combining those two. I made a cardboard model from my own foot and I copied it on a piece of plywood. I flipped the model around every other time so I was able to make three pairs of feet on the plywood. I used plywood because the layers of wood are in 90 degrees angle against each other, which means that both directions in the plywood are equally strong.

I cut the excess material off with a jigsaw. Then I assembled the rack from three pieces and painted a white base coat. Once the paint was dry I tried out my shoes on the rack. The places on the rack felt too tight and the shoes didn't slip on well. I think what had happened is that because I used a cardboard model that was much thinner than the plywood that the shoes slipped on that very well but not on the plywood because it is much thicker.

Then I redraw the model, I made it smaller and transferred the model on the plywood and then cut again with the jigsaw. I also used the Dremel to sand the edges and sanded the gap between the toes a bit bigger.

After I had tried a shoe on it I returned to the painting. I painted the areas that were now left unfinished and then painted one layer with furniture paint.

On the back of the rack I had drilled before the assembly six holes for the hooks. I attached the hooks with small screws. After that I measured the gap between them and the height where I wanted to place the rack and drilled two screw holes on the wall in the living room. Then I just hung the rack from the screws.

And there it is a shoe rack for three pairs of shoes. I think it's pretty cool, but if I would do it again I would not leave such a big gap between the wall and the rack, not sure if the support pieces on the sides could be similar as in here then, don't know... Anyway I like it, the shoes are near the terrace door and the door can be opened and closed without the shoes being on the way. Excellent.

Sandwich making basket

It's amazing how nackered one party can make you. We had friends over on Monday to celebrate May Day, we had sparkling wine and everyone brought food, did some BBQ and we had a great time. Then on Tuesday we went to our friends' place to have brunch and to hang out. By the time we got home it was time to eat again. I think all we've done on these two days is eat but still I'm really tired.

I was hoping to have something more grand to show by now, but I've been too tired to get anything done.
Few weeks ago I found a wire basket from the big pile of stuff we eventually inherited. I thought it could be used in the fridge to collar all the sandwich making products, like cheese, butter and cold cuts.

Before all those products needed to be taken from the fridge individually and it was slow and bit annoying. Those also spread out too much on the shelf and we had to push those around to get to the other things.

We've been using that basket now for couple of weeks and it's proven to be quite handy. Just one grab and we have all the things we need from the fridge to make a sandwich.

Excellent weather

I had been meaning to finish the spring cleaning by cleaning the cleaning cabinet itself, but the weather has been so nice that it would have been a sin to stay inside. So instead on saturday I sanded and jigsawed on the terrace, but nothing is finished yet. And on sunday I did some weeding in the garden and some reading in the conservatory where it was actually hot.

This evening and tomorrow we will be celebrating May Day, which is a big deal here in Finland. Tomorrow we have national holiday, yay! A made Sima this year and we've took a head start and have been drinking it on the terrace while enjoying the warmth of the sun.

Wish you a nice 1st of May!

How to clean a humidifier

We have a very old mustard yellow humidifier, look at it, isn't it beautiful? I'll let you admire it for a while

Wasn't that just beautiful.

Anyway, it's a working devise, despite it's looks, but after whole winters use it's become limy and not clean looking from the inside. I also suspect it would work better if it's not covered in lime. So since I'm an organized and anticipatory person I desided to clean the inside of the humidifier now before I place it in deep storage.

So how to clean a humidifier, and I mean how to clean a humidifier that works with an old fashion resistor and not one of those ultrasonic humidifiers or some other gizmo that I don't understand.

The cleaning is easy and you don't actually have to do much anything. The steps are:

1. Open your humidifier
2. Pour in a solution of 1:1 vinegar and water so that all icky looking parts are covered
3. Wait
4. Wait a little longer
5. Brush clean
6. Rinse

Once you pour the water and vinegar solution in the humidifier the lime starts to dissolve and some bubbles will form. I just left the solution in the humidifier for about 12 hours. I was supposed to leave it only for few hours but I forgot the whole thing and went to bed because it was bed time and then finally remembered the thing on the morning. That didn't matter at all, the longer you leave it be the better. Then I brushed the resistor and the inside a bit to make sure all the lime was loose or dissolved. And rinsed the inside. Whole lot better.

Quick building greenhouse

I have tomato seedlings again. I sowed many seeds on smallish pots, about ten per pot. I used cling foil to keep the growing contitions humid and light.

The cling foil was actually placed on top of the pots much nicer at first but then the seedling grew so long that they hit the cling foil and started to bend under it.

First I thought of making a tent out of grill sticks and cling foil. But found out a much quicker and easier solution. I just placed jars upside down on top of the pots. Looks odd, but works perfect and gives the seedlings longer time to grow before replanting.

Bedroom spring clean

We have a few bad habits, one of them is that we never ever fold our clothes when we change from the day clothes to pyjamas. We just place all the clothes on this small table in the bedroom.

Sometimes the pile is so big that the clothes on top keep falling on the floor. We've tried to change our habits, but so far with no lasting results. Next to the table is a small shelf and the plan is that we would fold our clothes on the shelves. But it seems to be very difficult. Very very difficult. The table is very pretty, it should be seen and not being covered by all those clothes.

I folded all the clothes and placed my clothes on my shelf, then folded all A's clothes and tried to place them on the shelf but it was allready so full that I had to leave them on the table.

Once I had done that I started removing all the underbed boxes to vacuum and mop the floor. I was supriced to find there one bottle of apple wine that we had made on the fall of 2009. I had been sure that we had drunk all the wine ages ago. That was a fun surprice.

I took the wine out from the box and since it's now empty I will take the underbed storage box to the outside storage room.

After I had most of the floor vacuumed and mopped I pulled the bed and the night stands away from the wall and cleaned the area under them. We also have some wires cables going under the bed for the lamps and the cell phone chargers. 

Those collect so much dust that I desided to contain them somehow. I had a bit of that wire cable tube thingy at home and used all of it. I think I will go and buy more, because it's good to have that at home in case of wire cable emergencies. 

After that was done, I pushed all the furniture back in their place and wiped all the other horizontal surfaces. 

We have a huge round lamp in the bedroom and I desided to dust it. It collects lot of dust. I placed an old sheet on the bed and dusted the lamp, since always some dust drops on the bed instead of getting cought on the duster.

I took pictures of the cleaned room after a few days on day light. I'm very annoyed that allready after a few days I can see new dust forming of top of the furniture. I guess it's all the textiles that make the bedroom so dusty. But here is after.

Would you have any ideas how we could motivate ourselves to fold our clothes, or would you have some other alternative for the folding of used clothes? Folding the clean clothes after washing has never been an issue, which is weird.

Stools!

It took longer than I thought to finish the stools I had got some time ago. It would have been fast but the weather has been weird. It has rained a lot and we've got even new snow on some days. But two weeks ago on Saturday the weather finally turned nicer and I was able to take the stools to the terrace and finish removing all the old paint from the stools. I used a chemical paint remover, that I happened to have at home. Since it smells awful and the removed paint goes all over the place I wanted to do that outdoors. The stools had quite many layers of paint, if they wouldn't have been so thickly painted I would have just lightly sanded them and repainted. But now I removed all the paint.

The first paint had coloured the wood, but that's okay, since I did plan to repaint the stools anyway. After I had removed the paint, I lightly sanded the stools and let them air a bit outside since they still smelled of the paint remover.

Then I took the stools inside and painted the first coat with primer, then two coats with the finishing paint. I had an idea that I wanted to paint the stools with some fresh funky and different colours. I bought one new paint jar, yellow furniture paint. I also already had dark red and white furniture paint. I thought the red paint itself was a bit murky, so I tried mixing some white with it. But it turned out like berry porridge. It didn't look fresh at all. Then I thought of mixing the green blue colour we used to have in the kitchen wall with the white.I liked it. It won't probably be as durable as the real furniture paint since it is furniture paint mixed with wall paint, but I don't think it matters.

See how happy they turned up. I couldn't be more satisfied about the result.

Thing is though that we don't really need many stools, but those are just so cool that I have to have them. For now I placed the smaller one in front of the office arm chair to work as a foot rest and the bigger one to work as a small table. We'll see where those end up. And yeah, that's a totally staged picture, I'm not currently reading that book.