Saturday, September 7, 2013

While Adamo was sleeping

So I'm going to start off by saying that I finally unpacked my camera. Unfortunately, it doesn't take very good pictures. You were warned.

I woke up at an ungodly early hour with an obscene desire to actually get out of bed. So I figured I'd just do one or two little things... starting with a little hook for my onion goggles on the kitchen cart.

Don't judge me, I'm sensitive!

Then I figured that since Adamo was still asleep, I could add those cabinet handles I bought at IKEA to create towel rods. (My first IKEA hack! -wipes a tear-) Bonus points that I got to be the first one to use our new drill bits.

Please ignore the sawdust

After I finished the first one, I realized I probably should have taken pictures so that I actually had something to talk about the next time I wrote a blog entry. Luckily, there were two handles! So here is a step-by-step of what I did, in case you have an IKEA Stensorp cart and want to add some towel racks. (For the racks, I used the 17½" Lansa cabinet handles.)

First, I basically eyeballed where to place the handle. I figured if I was off by a little, no one besides Adamo would notice. :P

It's crooked; don't trust it!!

Then I somewhat haphazardly squiggled carefully marked where to drill with a pencil at the top of the prong-thingies. (That's a technical term.) Forget the fancy drill templates you can get from IKEA; I am a rebel who can kinda measure stuff for myself!

Please ignore the mess and my morning hair

At this point Adamo woke up (probably because of all of the banging and drilling) and started taking pictures. And by taking pictures, I mean leaving the camera where it was on the counter but pushing the button for me. He is to blame for the weird faces I was making when I started drilling.

This face was the least weird

The Lansa handles call for a 3/16" hole, but I was nervous about wrecking the paint, so I did a starter hole of 1/8". I have no idea if that was actually necessary, but it seemed to help. I wish I had put painter's tape where I drilled, though, because the paint did end up chipping a bit. 

But with the base of the handle there, you can barely tell!

Not gonna lie, screwing the handles on was really annoying. Basically, I couldn't see what I was screwing into. At all. Not that it's necessary to figure out where the hole to screw into is necessary or anything!

One down, only five or so swears to get there

Unfortunately, despite my incredibly careful measuring, I was off by about two millimeters for the other side of the handle. It wouldn't have been a problem if the screws were a little longer (or the Stensorp a little thinner), but so goes my luck. 

I am saying, "$*^&#!! %^*$@!! *%$&# *&@$#!!!!!"

At first I just thought I was being particularly dense about managing to get the screw at the appropriate spot (it was really hard to tell since I couldn't even *see* where it was supposed to go). So I drilled a 1/2" hole for the top of the screw to fit into so that I had a little more length to wiggle the screw where I needed it.

reeeeeally should have used painter's tape to prevent chipping here :(

That did the trick and I was FINALLY able to attach the handle completely. 

Hooray!

A quick cleanup later and I had an added-function kitchen cart! 

Wow, I wonder why the kitchen suddenly became clean...?

Then I made some homemade spider repellent, because Adamo is amazing and has started the massive project of vacuuming all of the spiders and webs in the basement.

Like my label?

The next kitchen project is going to be adding a pull-out trash and recycling center to where our trash compactor used to be. We found a cabinet on craigslist that almost matched ours and snatched it up so that we can use the door to attach to the pull-out unit. 

It is also being used to stop the cats from going behind the cabinets.

That is going to be a big project, because we are going to need to build a base for the pull-out unit to rest on. That is obviously going to match even less, but we are also planning on painting the cabinets so that I can bear them for a couple more years before we remodel. 

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