My Latest Creation

Maybe I can't show my dad, but I can show you.

This is my latest creation.

We call it the antique corner.

Lots of challenges faced us when we moved into this house, the fact that it rained in the basement if we used the upstairs showers, chipped and broken asbestos tile in the family room, windows only the Professor could open, just to name a few.*  But even greater than those challenges was the challenge of what to do with all the stuff.

Because home repairs can be accomplished with enough money and/or blood, sweat, and tears. Dealing with stuff can threaten to end 25 year marriages.

A decade ago when we first prepared to move overseas the option of putting stuff into storage until our return saved our marriage.  I wanted to toss everything.  The professor wanted to keep everything.  As time ticked down and the arrival of the packers loomed large, storage was an attractive option.  We stopped debating and just shifted items into the destined for storage pile.

Unfortunately, what goes into storage must come out.  So in the midst of dealing with showers that rained into the basement and crumbling asbestos tile, we also had to deal with boxes and boxes of stuff we hadn't seen for years, much of which I would have been happy to never see again.

The Professor and I are clearly opposites when it comes to what stuff should and should not be kept. They say opposites attract but I've never heard anyone say that opposites make for a strong, stable, conflict free marriage.

Let's just skip ahead in the story and say that the large crawl space in our house has become the new storage and with God's grace and constant help our marriage is good for another 25 years or more.

But some items don't belong in the crawl space.  What to do with the antique typewriter, adding machine, and old rotary telephone?

And thus the antiques corner shelf was born.

The first plan was to buy a couple of shelves at Home Depot and put them up in this convenient corner space.  The only problem was that the exact sizes we needed weren't available.

No problem I thought, this is the land of things delivered right to my door.  I'll order something.  But I couldn't find anything that was both the right size and not expensive.

So I decided to do it myself.

I checked out what random scraps of wood were present in the shed and found two beat up shelves that the Professor had gleaned from the neighbors trash back in the early days when he was gathering any wood he could find to put on the floor of the crawl space to protect stuff from potential water damage.

I very scientifically made my quarter circle shapes with the marker tied to a piece of twine method then cut them out using a jigsaw.  I filled in the old screw holes with spackle and sanded everything down.

I found more wood scraps to serve as brackets and screwed them into the wall.  I primed, attached everything and painted.

I'm pretty pleased with the result.

After looking at the final product, the Professor added the antique I-Pod.  I'm trying to decide if I like it or not.  Should I add a small shelf above the phone to hold the I-Pod, leave the I-Pod on the shelf with the phone or get rid of the I-Pod altogether (and by get rid of I mean put in the crawl space of course). What do you think?

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* I could get the windows open if I used a hammer but for some reason that made the Professor nervous.