Basket Stand

As a followup to the earlier post regarding the Crochet Basket Stand, I am posting some better photos. No, it’s not staying there in the hall, that just happens to be a good spot to take a photo of it.
Here you can see the two green totes and the 4 baskets with crochet supplies in them.
This is the base. You can see I have used both shelving brackets and a wooden kicker. This keeps the whole thing from falling forward.
The shelf-posts are simply mounted with a shelving bracket and a single 3 inch long screw from the back. You can also see where I used the brackets to stifffen the stand up from rocking side to side.

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Computer in the Kitchen

I have been talking about putting a computer in the kitchen for YEARS now. Well, tonight, I finally did it. I stuck an old 450mhz AMD K6-2 above the cabinet and a 17″ monitor that Katie was given. It had windows on it, but windows sucks. I had 384mb or whatever it is of RAM in it, so I needed XP to see all the RAM.
Yeah, right. I put an old copy of Debian onto it. Old hardware, Old OS, old browser. It’s basically just for looking up recipies, chatting online while cooking, and as a large digital photoframe via the screen-saver.

I will use a portable wifi adapter I have to give it internet access.

Sitting on top of the fridge, I have an old DIGITAL brand keyboard and a broken mouse plugged into it right now. I tried finding my wireless mouse and adapter, could only find the keyboard so far. They are in a box in the spare bedroom… somewhere…

If I like it, and it gets used enough, and either breaks, or we can’t stand how slow it is, we will be replacing it with something a bit faster.

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Custom Furniture for the apartment

I made some custom furniture for the apartment. We where a bit lacking in counter-space so there was no place to put the microwave. Katie also has 4 really cool large baskets that we thought would be perfect for holding her Crochet projects, so I made a stand for those as well.

Here is the microwave stand. It’s height is inbetween the stove and the chest freezer to help transition the height difference. The top is a pre-made solid pine top. It cost something like $9. The legs where a single 10 or 12 foot 1×6. I used some used shelving brackets I had laying around I got on clearence years ago and used for something in my dorm room.
The stand will likely be finished in a cherry color to match the existing cabinets.


Here is the revised dining room. A bit different if you have seen it before Katie moved in. CVS gave us the 2 glass faced cabinets. They still need to be painted.
We picked up the mirror at IKEA this weekend. it matches the wroughtwork of the candle holders. I have a clock my sister gave me hanging on the mirror. I like it, I think it looks cool, Katie, not so much, blocks the mirror. She will likely win in the end. If she takes it down, I won’t put it back up.


Here is the basket-stand I made. It was made from three 2x4s ripped in half and cut to different lengths. All of it was pretty much cut to fit. I had a rough idea what I wanted, and we just held the peices to the baskets and cut them off where they looked right.

It is free-standing. It can only be tipped straight back, and then just barely. It hits the ceiling any other direction it wants to tip. I guess that makes it tip-resistant, as it will be backed up against a wall. I used up most of the shelf brackets I had left putting this together.

I think it turned out super-cool. Not sure how it will be finished as of yet. Stained is what I am hearing, I just don’t know what color yet.

A day of rest! NOT!

Well, I think today will be my first day that I am not at a dead run! It looks like it’s going to be cold, wet, and rainy all day. A good day to stay inside.

We are here, happy, and settling in. Katie has busted her butt cleaning up my mess of an apartment, getting unpacked, and basically making this apartment our home.

We went to my parent’s last weekend. I needed to drop of the trailer we borrowed to move Katie’s stuff back here. I also helped dad side the new garage, it’s looking really good. The new place should be ready for the reception by the time it comes up in only 3 weeks now? Scary!

While up there, I also bought a bit of wood and dad and I cut it to make some custom furniture. We had no counter space for the microwave Katie’s parents got us. I made something to fix that. Katie also has 4 really cool, large, wicker baskets. I made a rack that those fit into. These got assembled this week during the week. They turned out freaking awesome!

Went out with some of my college friends on Friday night. Some more friends came and visited yesterday. Our first house-guests. The living room, dining room, and kitchen where immaculate – thanks to Katie’s hard work. The bedroom, busy, full, but clean. The spare room. Yeah… I will need to declare war on that room today… We went out to eat at a Chinese place. The food was good, the service a bit lacking. This place seems to be pretty spotty for consistency, sometimes great, other times merely good. We went to IKEA afterwords. We found a really cool mirror for the dining room. That should get hung today. Also got some candles that smelled like chocolate. Glad we both love candles.

We have a bunch of photos to hang yet. We need to order prints of wedding photos for ourselves. I am going to order them from Snapfish. I have credit for 700 prints yet that I pre-ordered a few years ago. If you have photos from our wedding yet, let me know. I would like to get them from you. We may set up an album today if we get to it. If not, maybe another day.

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