Take Two

Man, I’m poofed! I’m relaxing on the sofa, treating myself to a Cobra. I’m celebrating that I finally managed to hang up the kitchen shelves I bought some time ago. When I say I bought kitchen shelves, that’s not actually entirely correct; I bought sheets of chipwood with pearwood finish that I had to cut into the right shape.

The shelves were going into a corner between two cupboards, so I needed to cut off all four corners of each sheet and end up with something five-sided that looked vaguely pentagram-shaped if you’d squint. Nadia and I spent several hours last weekend trying to calculate angles and lenghts until we saw squares and triangles dancing before our eyes; we had carefully measured the lengths of all the sides beforehand but just couldn’t seem to get things to match up. We had assumed that the angles between the two walls and between the walls and the cupboards were all 90 degrees. Unfortunately, they were not and I ended up just cutting the first one by careful eye-measurement and using it as a template for the last two.

After much huffing, puffing, drilling, sawing, panting, sweating, screwing and swearing the shelves are now finally up.