on playpens and coat racks

A slightly decaying scent wafts across the restaurant. "Oh wait, there's poop, I smell poop, which one is pooping?" At my question, four of my friends quickly set down their cappuccino's, grab their children in an upside-down manner, and start smelling their pants in a sort of professional, evaluating way that only one group of people in this world is capable of: new mothers. 

A final sniff, and one of the friends nods affirmatively. The culprit -together with a bag full of diapers- gets carried away towards the toilets. Quickly the chatter amongst my friends resumes, with as the main topic their children, and everything that comes with (or out of) it. 

Yep, I'm experiencing a tiny baby boom around me. My dear, small group of friends has managed to produce not one, but a grand total of five children in merely a year time. Despite loving the heck out of their chubby babies, I can't help but slightly miss the days when our friendship revolved around panicking over exams, bickering about the state of our student rooms, and holding impromptu cartwheel-competitions on the main square in the middle of the night.

While my biological clock may be a bit slow (or perhaps entirely absent, seeing that there are already quite a lot of human beings on earth) the thing I am terribly excited about, is thrifting quality children's stuff.  I mean: if something is designed to be smashed around, bitten, and licked by a wrecking ball in a romper (aka a baby), you can surely count on its quality. So, whenever I spot something good, I'll take it home.

Like this dismantled play pen that I found a while ago.

You think play pen's are only useful for the baby-minded ones amongst us? I beg to differ! 

A long time ago, part of this play pen had been turned into a side table, but I still had quite a few of those lovely wooden, baby-bitten sticks left!

wooden sticks!

This time, I decided to use them to tackle reoccurring problem in our household: the growing pile of coats at out back door, by making a wooden coat rack. And

You'll need:

- wooden sticks, I used about 2x 1 meter.
- electric drill with a drilling bit in the same size as the sticks
- a slate, about 5cm x 2cm and as long as you want your coat rack to be
- saw
- expanding wood glue
- sanding paper.


First, I measured, and cut my sticks into pieces of 6 cm each. I used my fancy saw (which is of course the proper technical name for this machine), but a hand saw will do as well.

It's a thing of beauty, this machine. Also: a bit of tape helped the sticks from rolling away!

Soon, I ended up with 18 of these beauties. You can do more or less, depending on the number of hooks you're going for.

The edges were a bit rough, so I sanded them down a bit for a smooth finish.

Now, unless you want to attach the pegs directly into your wall (I'm not saying I thought about it, but.. I thought about it..) you'll need some piece of wood to attach the pegs to.  Luckily, that day I had just ripped out the ceiling of our bathroom, and with it came quite a bit of perfectly usable wood.

Ooh, free timber! 

In order to arrange the pegs/hooks evenly, I divided the length of my slate by the number of pegs, ( in my case: 153 cm/18 = 8,5 cm between each peg)
The first peg comes at half that number: ( 8,5/2= 4,25 cm), and after the first one, 8,5 cm between each peg.

Time to get drilling (thrilling!)
Luckily, I had a drilling bit that was the same size as my pegs.

saves a lot of work!

And with a bit of drilling...

I may have accidentally drilled a hole into the garden table...

And sanding to cover up my sloppy job..

I'll admit this was pre-sanding :(

All that was left to do was attaching the pegs in place woth the expanding wood glue!

And voila: a play pen turned coat rack!

Quite rustic, eh? 

On a completely different matter, our fat cat Inky just did a tiny fart in my direction (bastard), so I'll post a unflattering picture of her to punish her.

Go and reevaluate your life choices, Inky.

cheers!