Boozer Bookshelf

I've been collecting wine bottles - attempting occasionally - mostly unsuccessfully - to make drinking glasses out of them. I had a few of these blue Aufkellerein bottles kicking around when the need for more book storage became evident.

After a visit to Instructables.com I found a great idea for this little boozy bookshelf project. And voila - an afternoon, several nights of drinking white wine in the park with my sweetheart, and a trip to the hardware store later: a lovely little place to house the children of my Amazon.ca addiction.

Cooling rack revision

Being the instructables junkie that I am, I recently came across as posting for a Floating Multi-Use Wall Storage device. I was immediately attracted to the project, and decided that I would undertake the construction of one such device for the storage of my "jewelry", which otherwise occupied a lonely spot in a basket under the bathroom sink. Not the best location to display the general sort of accoutrement prone to dandies.

I did not have any 1/4" hardware cloth - the sort of thing you might use for molding cement, in my experience, nor did I want to go out an acquire such a thing for the purposes of this project. Instead, I used a forlorn cooling rack that had not seen the light of day since it became relatively easy to find vegan baked goods around town. I had to use slightly larger washers given the spacing on my rack, and lag bolts rather than screws, for aesthetic reasons. I think the rod coupling nuts (5/16"-18 x 7/8"), really make this work both visually and functionally.



And Voila! This was an incredibly easy project, and honestly, I find it an elegant, if not somewhat unconventional,addition to my dressing chambers. For the smaller objects, such as label pins, I glued a few magnets behind some thick, pin-able material and stuck that onto the rack.


I actually don't really have enough "jewelery" to make full use of the space now available to me. I suppose I will now have to undertake some tie pin and cuff-link making projects....

Starting simple: the bleach bottle magazine holder.

Briefly – I’m not a fan of bleach, but I’ve had this bottle kicking around for a while. I recently celebrated the end of what I imagine might be the final bottle of bleach to enter my home (check out some bleach alternatives). At about the same time, I was looking for a way of storing a little bathroom reading in a way that was functional and unobtrusive.

I remember that my mother had used a bleach bottle to store clothes pins. So... thanks mom, smart thinking! Here’s what I did. All it took was an basic utility knife.


I was actually pleasantly surprised to discover that the bottle didn’t just tip over under the weight of a lot of magazines.