I am back and hopefully I will be able to go full steam till Christmas. My absence has nothing to do with not wanting to write but much more with my capacity to be a wife, a mother, work and BAKE all at the same time.

In preparation for our annual Champagne Sales Day, where I also sell my Greek Delicacies, I wanted to start early to make sure I have enough stock to sell. You might ask how much is ‘enough stock’ and the answer is “I have absolutely NO CLUE”. Who knows how many people will want to dig into my food? So, being true to my heritage I have started making a supply big enough to feed a small village!

Now that you know what I have been up to, we can get back to something less time consuming.

CABLE REEL TABLES

We had a need for a round table in our lounge as a side table and we needed to find something affordable that suited our décor. It really didn’t seem like a difficult task until we started our search from anything new to second hand.  If you would believe me, there are not that many round side tables available.

This led us to think outside the box and we decided to start looking for Cable Reels. My husband went to a hardware store close to his work to find out if we they could help him with some and managed to get 3 for free!! (totally ticked the budget box and they were very much to my liking). We had to do a little work on them to make them work as tables. Below are some hints on how to make Cable Reels useful:

Might be a problem: Always make sure that the Cable Reel can stand stable as you will be putting glasses and plates down on them.
Might be a solution: Cut two long strip of wood and place them on the bottom of the reel, levelling it out. Shape the wood till you have a stable table

Might be a problem: If using inside your house you don’t want it to scratch your floor.
Might be solution: Use off-cuts from a carpet and paste it onto the bottom of the wood strips used to stabilise the reel.
We have two outside for when we Braai etc. (BBQ for the non-South Africans) and one inside. We definitely didn’t want the inside one to damage our floor, but didn’t mind as much on the outside on our porch, so we left the carpets as protectors off them.

Might be a problem: The top surface is uneven, the bolts are sticking out or the hole is preventing you from putting things down on the reel safely.
Might be a solution: Have a glass top cut that will fit onto the top of the reel. Use door nobs as spacers between the reel and the glass top. Preferable get something like safety glass as it will prevent the glass for shattering into little pieces if you have an accident.
As mentioned we kept two outside which we kept rustic without glass tops, but prefer a glass top on the inside one.

It is said one man’s trash is another’s treasure….Hope you find some trash that works for you !!!!

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Our household has a slight imbalance when it comes to Testosterone.  Currently it is 4 Testosterone bodies versus 1 Estorgen. And seeing as 3 of those 4 Testosterone bodies are all still minors, there are just some things you need to learn to work around. One of those things is to find everything that needs to go back into the school bag to school! After a school library book went “missing” for about 3 weeks, I had to make a plan.

You might not believe me but it is actually much easier than you think to lose a book in my “kinda ocd tidy – I know where everything is” house. So, in order to solve my problem I had a few choices:

1. Put trackers on every item needed for school (my budget doesn’t allow this)
2. Mess up my house to find the missing books (no OCD person, even if you only have it slightly,  will ever agree to this)
3. OR as any creative person would do….make one dumping point for all the school goods! (much better sounding idea as I didn’t have to choose from the first two options….rescue remedy avoided!)

It didn’t take very long for me to get an idea of what I wanted and I had the perfect wall to mount my new “Dump It Station”.

In order to get this new station made I needed to rope in the adult Testosterone in my house. So with one Testosterone body and one Estrogen body we set off to by all the materials.

Our materials list was simple:

• 3 containers for school books and supplies
• Hooks (preferably 2 per child)
• Wood to mount the containers onto
• Nice big bolts to attach it to the wall (Testosterone body sorted this out for me)

We used Bashew crates*  and went to our local wood yard to find rustic looking wood pieces. In order to get the piece to look like I wanted we needed to attach the crates to the wood before we attached it to the wall.

*for my overseas readers, any drinking bottle crates like Coke or Pepsi will work

As much it is great to make things on my own, there are just some things that are more enjoyable with my best friend next to me. It also doesn’t hurt that he has much more muscle than I have, as the wood was pretty heavy!

I think though the best part of making this was my littlest testosterone filled body telling me that I must please stand away as he will be helping his Dad build this with his tools!

So when you have a testosterone problem are getting messy, get creative…..BUILD A “DUMP IT STATION”

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