Home Improvements
2020 was a year for home renos for many people. For those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs and who usually spend a bunch of money on travelling, sprucing up the old homestead seemed like a good way to spend the money that would otherwise have gone to flights and hotels. Plus people were stuck in their homes all year and thought “well, this could be nicer”.
I can’t say I did any major renos – but I did two teeny tiny things.
First, I finally got around to staining the bit of wood that was exposed when we removed the old closest door, including its track, and put in a new closet door, which did not have a track. And by “finally” I mean I did this in August, and I’d had the new door installed in August 2018. Better late than never!
Before:
After the first coat:
Final product:
The other thing that I did was hang some spice jars from magnets in my kitchen.
I first saw this over on Kimli’s blog and thought “this is the spice solution I’ve been looking for all my life!” So I got the same jars and the same magnets that she used, which came with 3M stickies that she just stuck under a kitchen cabinet and put the magnets on. I stuck all the magnets and hung the jars and then slowly over the next few days, half the magnets fell as the stickies weren’t strong enough. I’m not sure if I just have a different kind of cabinet than hers or perhaps I should have let the magnets/stickies adhere to the surface longer before I put the spice jars on them. At any rate, I spent a few months with half my spice jars hanging from magnets and the other half sitting on the counter all willy nilly. But this week, I finally got off my butt and went to Lee Valley Tools and bought three magnet bars that you would typically install in a workshop to hang metal tools from. They are wood with a long magnet in the middle and I was able to screw the bar into the bottom of the cabinet and now all my spice jars are neatly lined up in a row under my cabinet!
So those are my two teeny home improvement projects for the year. Maybe in 2021 I’ll get around to painting the insides of the closets like I’ve been talking about doing for years!