Archive for January 21st, 2009

YES!

Whether by nature or by nurture, none can say, but I grew up with a certain “can-do” attitude toward improvising.  Duct tape was and is my closest friend (other than my wife, of course).  Colored duct tape is the greatest thing since WD-40.

This made life as a bachelor… shall we say… “interesting.”

My completely imaginary attorney advises me to say something like “don’t try this at home.”  The realist in me leans more toward “it’s your own dang fault if things screw up, so don’t try it if you’re just gonna blame me later.”

Windows for Dummies

The front door of my old apartment, cursed be its walls, had a nice big window that was completely transparent.  No frosting, tinting, mirroring, or other modern inventions of the 18th century offered any privacy whatsoever.

Walmart bags, on the other hand, are translucent but not transparent at all.  Out came the scissors and the tape and with only an hour or two of painstaking work, I had frosted windows… the bachelor-pad way.

I can’t sew (slightly untrue, actually) and couldn’t afford curtains, but a shower rod and old linens served to improve my sense of privacy in the other windows.

Don’t ask me about the moth holes.  Don’t.  It’s embarrassing.

My Shelves Runneth Over

Weburbanist.com has featured bookshelves made from books.  “This is pretty awesome,” my wife says. I’m not impressed.  She should see the end tables and ottomans I’ve made by stacking up old copies of Reader’s Digest.

When my bookshelves overflowed, I ended up expanding them with empty Velveeta cheese boxes and worthless trading cards.

My ink-cartridge bookends, however, were less than successful.  Those bloomin’ things leak.

Aylad the Iron Chef

We were given an incredibly expensive electric mixer for a wedding gift.  Actually owning a mixer feels strange to me, since duct-taping a couple of plastic forks to a drill bit always worked well enough for me.

While other people my age were learning from Martha Stewart how to turn a DIY herb garden into a seven-course meal, I was learning (via Johnny Depp in Benny and Joon) how to make grilled cheese sandwiches on an ironing board.

With an iron.

Now we have a nifty little panini press (apparently “panini” is Italian for “ironed bread”) that by comparison makes my ironing board look like, well, like an old, crusty, cheese-flavored ironing board.

Of course, the panini press’s duties have now expanded to making quesadillas (Spanish for “ironed flatbread”) and smoothing the occasional wrinkled necktie.  I should have bought one of those years ago.

He: Why do you own seven colors of duct tape?
Me: Why wouldn’t I own seven colors of duct tape?

(Photo credit and license)