Little Fixes

I’m still waiting for resolutions to both the basement plumbing issue and the cornice issue.  Hopefully things will start getting repaired next week, but anticipating the inevitable draining of a savings account can get a girl down, you know?  So this weekend I wanted to tackle a DIY project that would be quick, cheap, and happy-inducing.

These days, my cheerful new purple closets are pretty happy-inducing.  Except for this one nook where I store my belts:

I credit What Would a Nerd Wear for my new-found love of thrift store belts, but my growing collection of $1 bits of leather was getting out of hand.  Some buckles just wouldn’t fit over those round knobs, leaving all the other belts to stack up on two crummy hooks all the way in the back.  Messy belt storage:  the perfect tiny problem to fix with a quick Saturday morning trip to Ikea.

…And some life-hacking, of course. I wanted a little metal rail and some s-hooks, but Ikea’s bathroom/kitchen rails were all too long.  After wandering in aimless loops around the kitchen showroom forever, I discovered these drawer pulls:

Those are the 5-inchers, but they also sold 13″ — perfect.  I grabbed a set and took them home… where I discovered that there really is no way to mount a drawer pull to a wall.  Pulls are normally mounted by feeding a screw through them from the inside of the cabinet.  Duh, Laur.

I pawed through my drawer of loose bits of hardware for some kind of modification, but the answer was right in front of me:

I just grabbed the crummy hooks my more difficult belts were hanging from, and anchored them properly to the wall.  Then I fed their tips right into the existing screw holes in the drawer pull.  Perfect fit!

I organized my belt collection by color because I am slightly insane.

With the little hooks recycled and the rails installed, I then searched for a new home for the set of knobs.  They landed on a stretch of open wall next to the bed:

Hey!  A place to hang your bathrobe or your outfit for tomorrow.  Useful and free.

Organizational improvements always cheer me up, and this set did not disappoint.  Next week it’s back to the gritty stuff, yeah, but until then I can just stare at my belt rainbow.