Lockdown hobbies

For all the time I've had my house, my nifty storage plan in my laundry has been to keep things on the floor. [Laundry: US laundry room? Utility room? I know they do laundry whereas we do washing. In our laundries.] However, that all changed when to amuse myself in lockdown I bought a new air fryer. It's bigger than my old one, which means it's more useful, but it's also such a tubster that I can't fit it onto the kitchen shelf the old one lived on. Time for a Storage Solution.

My local hardware big box store had helpful-looking standalone shelves, with contactless click and collect. Sold! Even better, they required a rubber mallet to assemble. How cool is that? I had visions of it making DOINGGGGG!!! noises like in the cartoons. Sadly, it wasn't three feet across like a cartoon one after all, but I swallowed my disappointment and soldiered on.

The posts for this thing have keyhole shaped holes in them, and the horizontal shelf support rods have round iron suckers on the ends. You're supposed to insert the suckers in the round part of the keyhole, then "tap lightly" with the mallet to move them into the narrower bit so that they're firmly stuck in there and don't suddenly disengage and decant your air fryer onto the floor.

Tap lightly? Yeah, right. I had to thump on those things so hard the entire neighbourhood was ringing. I was surprised there wasn't a queue of horses at the back door wanting new shoes.

Anyway, other than putting in the first shelf support rod upside down (requiring some sustained "light tapping" to fix) it all seemed pretty straightforward. Rod, rod, rod, rod, shelf, rod, rod, rod, rod, shelf... Like a boss. Until I put the second to last vertical rod in upside down.

The mallet (now looking like it had been chewed by a Great Dane, BTW) wasn't going to rescue me this time. I'd already had to lightly tap, with considerable force, the rod into a connector that had no reverse-tappable areas, and that thing was not coming apart. I oiled it (with olive oil spray. Oil is oil and the garage is all the way across the garden) with no success, then asked my much less feeble housemate to haul on it. And she was successful! The only problem was that the rod she managed to dislodge was the one on the other side of the connector. You know, the one that was in the right way up.

Now I have to admit that when I was studying cognitive psychology I swiftly discovered that mental rotation was not my forte. So I had to stare at this for quite some time before I realised that because the connector was symmetrical, I could just turn the whole thing around, making the wrong way up rod the right way up, then flip the other rod to the right orientation and reattach it.

Magnificent! I am a genius! I twirled it around, hammered it into place, moved onto the last rod and stood back to admire my handiwork.

At which point I discovered that when I'd reattached the offending rod, I'd made EXACTLY THE SAME MISTAKE AGAIN. The top rod was upside down.

GODDAMN IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!

Fortunately, thanks to the previous basting with olive oil, this time I was able to wrestle the rod out of the connector myself, flip it around and replace it before I could make any more mistakes. But wow. As we would say in NZ, I am such a nong.

Here's the finished product:









You can see my air fryer brooding menacingly on one of the bottom shelves, so that solved that problem. The thing I particularly love, though, is that by attaching only the support rods at the sides and back, rather than putting an actual shelf in, I can use my breadmaker (which I use for mixing sourdough) and my bread proofer in situ as there's room for the lids to open. Brilliant! It means giving up some shelf space, but it's so worth it.

I also like this view:









as it attractively spotlights the rust marks on my 40+ year old dryer. My mother gave it to me when she moved on to a new one. It still works perfectly.