I've never had a drinks cupboard and find the idea a bit weird. I know a notorious drunk who had a cider cupboard, but don't know why he bothered locking stuff in there. It's not like it was going to be in there long.

I am grovelling before WOM's creative prowess. I've been quite pleased with some projects I've done in the past - two sets of fitted wardrobes, a fitted dressery-bookcasey thing in a kitchen, and numerous smaller items, repairs etc. But all those larger projects were fitted - I'm surprised WOM hasn't done any fitted stuff - it's easier as it doesn't need "ends" and will definitely stand up and have nice vertical sides.

Mrs. Sits insists on using professionals these days, she was a bit dubious about me putting a hook up the other day.

I always like getting the toolbox out though, especially if I need to use one of the four or five things in there which belonged to my Dad. It makes me feel connected to him as I don't have much of his stuff. I've always wondered whether he got his old nail-pulling pliers (I don't know what they're correctly called) from his Dad as they are very old, held together with a rivet like these:

Thanks, all. This stuff is all surprisingly easy. Just one small task at a time and it's done.

As for that little whatsit on the floor beside the liquor trunk, it's a carved chess set we bought in Cuba in November. My son is on a chess bender, so we were playing on the beach every day. Nerds...can't take 'em anywhere.

MsD wrote:


Different strokes, I guess. I think it looks beautiful.

Nice work, WOM! I need a wardrobe. Can you come visit me and bring your tools?

Incandenza wrote:

I can see it looks nice, but doesn't fit in his flat and wouldn't in mine, either. It just looks odd, not luxurious, which is what I seek in a home furnishing.

Re WOM and his DIY stuff - credit where due, he can bung some bits of wood together very well.

Great stuff, WOM. Very inspirational. Maybe I'll take a picture of my desk and shelves, rudimentary as they are.

This weekend I repaired our running toilet. Not as glamorous as far as handymannery goes, but any time I don't have to pay a plumber is good.

I built a Lego X-Wing fighter on Sunday – single-handedly. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count (in fact, it may even be a point in the negative column), but it was a present to my 10-year-old self.

Ha, building Lego isn't practical, I suppose, but it gives you a pretty similar satisfaction to building something bigger and more useful. I think that's part of the appeal of Ikea, actually: it's like a Lego-carpentry mashup.

Speaking of Ikea, went there on Friday night. Renart will know the location, but it's a bit of a schlep down from where I live to Ikea, especially considering traffic on the freeway--it's not an impulse trip. Wanted to get a chair for our daughter's room. It comes in two packages--the seat itself, then the swivel base. We got the junior size of the seat, asked an employee to make sure that it would fit on the regular base, he said yes. Took it home and discovered that wasn't true.

So Sunday afternoon I went down there again, asked where the base that fit the seat was, someone else said "oh...yeah, we haven't carried the base in about 6 months. I don't know why we still sell the seat part." So had to go back up into the maze and pick out a new chair, and of course I didn't bring the seat part down to return, only the base. Looking at a third trip to get my money back...

Ugh. I wonder if Ikea's having supply chain troubles. Half of the floating shelves I bought at Ikea last month were missing the screws and hex keys they were supposed to come with.

(Eat at the ridiculously named Pho King Way on your next trip. It's just south of the shopping center the Carson Ikea is in.)

I saw that place on the Yelp app! The first thought both my wife and I had was "no Pho King Way!"

Ha, that's the joke Mrs. Renart and I always make, too. But I've heard it's actually pretty good.

Thanks for the tip. There are just a handful of Vietnamese places around me, also with pun names: Pho Sho, and in Beverly Hills, 9021Pho.

Yeah, that seems to be a thing on the West Coast, especially with Asian restaurants.

Some day I'll open an Italian-Vietnamese restaurant called Pho Geddaboutit.

Cali-Pho-nia on Clement St. recently closed, to the disappointment of no one, to be replaced by a sort of Asian sports-bar i haven't tried yet.

If you're feeling handy, these are super-easy to do and very cheap. Just 1x2 strapping (or other crap wood) and a mess of screws. (This guy below has used some nice wood, and he's varnished them, too) What's neat is that the seat part slides forward and out and tucks into the back piece for storage and carrying. I can't seem to find the plans online right now, but I'll keep poking around. I made 10 or 12 as gifts a few years ago.

Oh yeah, that's nice. What's covering the screws?

Why does everybody here except me seem to be good with their hands? I can’t even cut a bread roll in half, as I proved a few weeks back. I ended up looking like something out of that “Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days” Monty Python thing.

I blame my father, who was incapable of as much as sharpening a pencil. In fact, he couldn’t even get other people to do things properly. We first had a shower fitted when I was about twelve. It worked for about three days. And when I say ‘worked’, I don’t mean ‘worked properly for three days and then became a bit temperamental’; it just packed up completely after 72 hours.

And because my father thought that the malfunction was due to was something really simple and that if he rang up the bloke who’d fitted the shower, he’d have laughed in his face and then told everybody down the pub about it, the shower remained broken until my father moved house about ten years later.

Renart wrote:


Cheap wood plugs.
Countersink the screws. Glue in the plugs. Chisel and sand to smooth.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5wBVIvmXM8