Homey Things

Yes, you have missed out on the final installment of the 'walk to class'. You should feel very ripped off. It should appear this week sometime, but right now the author of that series is working very hard with the Cappadocians and may not be disturbed. Feel free to contact our complaints department to lodge a complaint. We care about your pain.

Instead, you get to see some of the excellent things that God has given us to make our lives so much more enjoyable.

The first are our bookshelves. Mark put these together with a manual screwdriver (no mean feat); I hammered the backs onto them and here is one of them:

Of course, an empty bookcase is not the same as a full one. Particularly when it is full of some of your most favourite books in the world. Here is the one in our bedroom (there are another two in our lounge room). This one contains all our commentaries, important books that we can't do without (like Robin Hobb, Greg Bear, George Eliot, Chaim Potok, Terry Pratchett, Gurps series, etc...), and a small collection of books we really want to read in the next four years. It immediately made our bedroom feel more home-like!



The two bookcases in the loungeroom have mostly academic books, theology and philosophy, our DVD's and all the recipe books. (Providentially, Barth's Dogmatics and Brunner's Systematic Theology fitted exactly on the same shelf...let the reader understand. This caused me great amusement).

Mark in his role as 'Bob the Builder' also constructed a laundry hamper, which even has drawer-like sections and a shelf on top.

I was so impressed by this. I love things with drawers and compartments and so forth. And I like things to have their own spot, particularly dirty laundry, and this version has two drawers, so you can sort the colours from the whites in the process of putting the washing in the hamper, compressing two tasks into one smooth task. It's this kind of efficiency that makes my world a better place. (It's a personality thing; I take no responsibility for it).

We received this as a flat-packed parcel and Mark took it into the spare room. There were all kinds of noises and some long silences; the couple of times I ventured in there he was lying on his back, with assorted wood panelling in all directions, and once it looked like he was building himself into the laundry hamper which would have been an interesting outcome. And then I walked in and it was done. It went from this assortment of wood to this functioning set of drawers in one evening. It was like a small miracle! I was impressed.

Most impressive of all, however, was his construction of The Kitchen Trolley. To understand why I might be most impressed by this, you need to understand that constructing this involved a puzzling set of instructions with strange looking diagrams, screws, wheels, panels and a lot of other things which did not, in my opinion bode well. The only thing I knew about flat-packed things is that they often go wrong and are never the same as the picture. I didn't think I could really contribute to the process, so I went and did useful things in a different room. My expectations were not high. Yet the outcome was as miraculous as the laundry hamper - moreso as the complexity was greater, and it not only looked like the picture but functioned better than the picture had led us to believe.

To understand this, you need to know that our kitchen is fairly small. If you were the kind of person who wanted to swing a cat (not that I would advise it for various reasons, including the injuries likely to be sustained in the aftermath of the cat swinging exercise; cats understand vengeance), you might be able to swing one in the kitchen provided it was a small cat and your arms were not long. Probably you would just give up and find another place to swing the cat, I would imagine. The kitchen is small.

However, there is very little bench space and this probably wouldn't matter, but we like to cook together and there isn't really enough room for us to do that. We discovered this little trolley in the Argus catalogue. It was the skinniest one they had, and I still had misgivings about it taking up too much room in the kitchen and defeating the purpose of freeing up space. However, when this was built and we wheeled it in, it fitted snugly against the wall and didn't jut out into the doorway at all. There is now less room to swing a cat, (which is fine as we don't have a cat and are unlikely to swing it in the kitchen in any case. Unless it was a Schrodinger's cat, in which case we wouldn't know whether we were swinging it in the kitchen anyway.) But importantly there is more room to work in the kitchen because of the extra bench space this brings, which is at exactly the right height for me.

And there's more. It brings with it much needed storage space with a collection of shelves on wheels with nifty little boxes and drawers, which is fantastic given the limited amount of pantry space and shelving we have available. (Mark has several Coke caches around the house, in various cupboards, as the bottles won't fit in our 'pantry' which is small bookcase inside the electricity measuring cupboard).

Best of all it means that we can both work in the kitchen at once without ending up entangled, which is important when there are urgent Gravy Issues to resolve.

We have enjoyed these additions to our home immensely. And I'm very impressed with Mark's ability to turn flat-packed products into useful objects without power tools. JMB