My Handy Man

Yesterday Michael and I made some home improvements to our apartment that gave us a lot more space to store things. Some of you may already know this about me, but I love finding the most efficient way to use the space I have - perhaps that's the industrial engineering side of me. Michael was the one who actually did all the handy work, and I am so thankful for his hard work - he did a fantastic job! So we thought we'd share with you all the improvements we were so excited about yesterday...

This is the utility closet that is outside on our patio. The shelf you see here had fallen down before we ever moved in because whoever put it up previously did not properly support it by attaching it to the studs in the wall. This meant that all the items you see sitting on the shelf in the picture, had been piled on top of the dryer - which was really aggravating to me because it made it difficult to reach the dryer controls and lint screen. But thanks to my handy man, those days of aggravation are over! He attached some "L" brackets to the studs to support all of the weight, then added some safety clips to keep it from flipping forward.

This is the space in our downstairs living room (which is actually our bedroom - see our August 23rd blog post if you want to know why we did it this way) where the dog kennels are. Previously, we kept the bicycle laying on top of the kennels, with all of the pet items piled on top - not very neat or efficient. So the solution (which Michael brilliantly came up with) was to hang it from the ceiling to clear up that space. Awesome idea - quite a bit harder to implement: have you ever tried to find studs (joists) in the ceiling? Not easy. You can't use a stud finder because the texture is too rough. Supposedly, they should line up with the studs in the walls, but our apartment must not have been built normally because there was no rhyme or reason as to where the joists were. We ended up just nailing a small nail in several different places until we found them. Thankfully we found two joists spaced at the right distance apart so we could hook the bike wheels and wallah - all done! Doesn't it look so much better?!

This is our coffee table - the legs are extremely weak and have fallen off many times before. Previously we would use a super powerful glue to try to reattach them, but it is only temporary. Michael's idea is to screw in small "L" brackets into the wood of the leg and bottom of the table - two brackets per leg to secure them. We ran out of time last night to do this little project, but I thought I'd brag about Michael's brilliance here anyways since he's so great at accomplishing anything he puts his mind to.