This Saturday we conquered 3 minor but important home improvement projects, two of which safeguarded us against fire hazard and one of which made the dining room better.
Speaking of the dining room. Big stuff going on in there this week. You’ll see.
So, first we did the easy thing. Until now, the light in the dining room has just been a bulb hanging from a chain. Very depressing. I’d been thinking about getting a paper lantern shade at World Market, but seeing how I haven’t been to World market in months (and even then it was in Kansas City, not closer Wichita) that plan was looking dimmer and dimmer by the day (pun intended). So, plan A went out the window when I saw this nice shade at Target. We just unscrewed the bulb and hung this upside down and screwed the bulb back in. Easy peasy. Not perfect but better than a bare bulb (for another 12+months).
Second, we eliminated a fire hazard in our laundry room. I am ashamed to say that we have had the washer and dryer for over 6 months and never addressed this problem. After vacuuming 6 months of lint out from the walls/floors/everything behind the dryer, we installed what I refer to as an elephant trunk:
We got a fancy one from Lowe’s that goes into a vented container, since it’s impossible to vent to the outdoors. So we’ll just have to remember to empty the container once in a while. The hose leads to what we refer to as “the furnace room” because it’s a weird little room in the hallway of our building with the furnace in it. Which brings me to the next project.
Until Saturday, the furnace room didn’t have a door. Which meant that the whole hallway could hear whether our furnace was running or not (this used to come in handy actually, before it was repaired). There was a door IN the room, just not attached to anything. So we bought some hinges and tried to hang a door. It doesn’t close without being forced, but there’s a door attached now and it’s being held shut by a door stop, so we still count it as a win.
Have any visually unimpressive but necessary projects you haven’t gotten to yet?
My Friend Staci 
next post:
minorities are important.a brief summary of our mexican neighbor.