Lean on Me

LEAN ON ME

And so two months in and I am settling in this, my Little Grey House. My last raving about storage is still a reality, the list hasn’t diminished, in fact it continues to grow.

I spoke of my stuff and how nothing seemed to fit… well even my bar stools were lost in space with the lack of a ‘bar’ to house them. For the loss of anything else to do I lined them up along the window and well, they just stuck… they seemed to belong there.

See what I mean…

The dining space here is spacious and light, better than my last which was a little cramped. The kitchen here, on the other hand, is a third the size of my previous, so its a matter of swings and roundabouts, ups and downs, mountaintops and valleys. Whatever adage or aphorism that floats your boat really.

And so I thought, aha, a Leaner, a Bar Leaner is what I need and so my search began. I found a beautiful one called the Dowel Leaner but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend the $3000+ it would take to make it mine. Perhaps I would have should this Little Grey House be a forever home for us but its not, its a transition, a year is how long we plan to stay. A year to make it beautiful enough for the next person to want to live in it just as I did with my Little Black House.

Reverting back to my need for things to be built in, to belong, to be anchored; well in the case of the Bar Leaner it turns out its a much cheaper option! And so the idea for a floating leaner with the backdrop of the window and the pretty feijoa hedge was borne.

The brackets were easy, well sort of, they did go missing in action but finally found their way to me. A little large, meaning the leaner would be too high meant we needed to cut them down a fraction.

The search for the ideal piece of timber to fit the space was pretty fruitless and I ended up at a timber company buying a piece of ply that would have to suffice. Having cut it to the desired size, sanded and varnished it it was ready to attach, or so I thought, but no, he ‘who likes to talk much’ was worried about the leaner bending, as wood tends to do, when not fully anchored. This, a floating leaner, needed a little reinforcing with an L shaped piece of steel along the back. So with that cut, painted and attached the leaner was ready to install. The brackets came with screws to fit it, ensuring a little bit of stability for its purpose.