I'm starting a new category, DIY, to capture improvements we're making around the house.
I had a very productive day of DIY yesterday. I made and installed a couple of flyscreens for our bedroom and the lounge room. Flyscreens are amazingly simple to make. All you need is a hacksaw, mitre box and a special tool for stuffing the spline into the slot which costs about two bucks. All the materials for the screens themselves can be bought at your local hardware store. The most important thing, though, is to get your measurements right. Geometric transformations in your head, the classic tool of IQ tests, are needed to ensure you're cutting the aluminium in the right direction.
After the screens we grabbed four bike storage hooks from Cell Bikes down on Parramatta Road and I installed them. This allows us to store our four bikes in a very small space. Hanging from the front wheel isn't ideal, but we need the space. I made a bit of a mess of the wall getting the holes drilled with my crappy non-hammer cordless drill, but once we get a shed built we'll repaint the room anyway.
The next project will happen tomorrow. We've bought some laminate flooring and a bunch of Ikea shelves. The laminate needs to acclimatise to the kitchen for two days, so that means we can't lay it until tomorrow lunchtime.
Apart from the floor and all the shelves, the crappy cupboard and bench in the middle there is coming out to be replaced with the Udden stainless steel console we've already got, supplemented with two drawer units. With those drawers and all the shelves, we should find ourselves with much more kitchen space and certainly it'll be a lot nicer.