Friday, May 8, 2009

Bracketless Shelves

My wife bought these cute, “bracketless” shelves for the bathroom. She asked me to hang them for her on the wall over the jetted tub. She explained exactly how she wanted them arranged, but I told her the design wasn’t artistic enough. So, after several sketches of potential designs, several fights about her calling my designs stupid, and several instances of flying shoes; I went to hang the shelves exactly how my wife had originally said she wanted them. Although I did so confidently believing that it was my idea all along.

I was born with an incredible eye for gauging when things line up, are at the same height, and are level to my relative position. So, I got to work attaching the brackets to the wall, they aren’t in fact “bracketless” after all, and eyeballed their relative levelness. When I got done, the shelves were perfect.

That is when I brought my right foot out of the tub, my left foot having stayed outside on the bathroom floor, and found out that the jetted tub is actually higher than the bathroom floor.

I tried to explain to my wife that the “left lean” of the shelves was intentional, my own little way of adding some artistic flair to her bland design. She just scowled at me and told me to fix it. I spent the next 15 min weighing the potential time and effort that it would require to un-hang and re-hang the shelves. Finally, I decided to just shave off the bottoms of her candles so they would lean to the right.

Except when one of the candles takes a swan dive off onto the bathroom floor, this solution has worked out fine.