Is it normal?

Is it normal to call your Mom and flush the toilet and say "did you just hear that?!?!??!"
(in my defense, I've been having to squat in an inconspicuous place in the yard to pee for 2 years...the excitement when our water was turned on was warranted!)

Is it normal to see a Starbucks cup in the background of 80% o the pictures you take?

(It's like our own fun version of Where's Waldo)

Or how about penguins?  Is it normal to carry around a penguin with you everywhere you go and document the things you do with it?  A penguin with a buttcrack no less (we like to spin his head around so you can see it at all times)...

(up high)

 

Are you starting to worry about us?

That is my niece Sydney's penguin.  My sister took her to pick out a craft to do a few months ago and she chose this penguin to color and "decorate".  So she colored him and drew a big buttcrack on the back of him.  We asked Sydney if he had a name and she looked at us like we were idiots and said "Buttcrack Penguin"...like, duh, isn't it obvious? As if we thought he might be named something else, silly us!   So we used to just call him Buttcrack, but have since shortened it to "BC Penguin", and each week she likes to send him home with someone new, and then we tell her what we did with him all week.  Well Buttcrack came to work with me and met some of my friends, he helped us do work at the house (hence the ladder shot), he helped us work on some trim in the woodshop...he was quite fun to tote around.  And we actually got to keep him for 2 weeks - lucky us!




Okay now I will get to my point.  I'm not sure that it's "normal" to want to just make/create/build everything you need.  But more times then not when I am looking for something, Lee says "what if I just make it?"  I can't tell you how many times those words have come out of his mouth in the past 2 years since this project started...but he always pulls through.    I have been searching for the perfect open shelving for our kitchen for months.  Googling, checking message boards, pinteresting...it's been a lot of hard work.  All of the clicking gets to my hand after a while.  After searching for so long and not finding what I was looking for, Lee of course says "let's just make them". 

I actually had thought of that a long time ago, but didn't want the brackets supporting the shelves from below like this:

And that's the only way I could find instructions to build them. I wanted the brackets above the shelves, so there was a clean line under the shelf.  So after telling him that he's like "right, lets just make them" at which point I just follow him around Home Depot trying to figure out where he was going with his thought.

 So he buys some metal strips (don't mind my terminology) and cuts them down to the same width of our shelves...

 He then introduced me to a fun new tool - a drill press.  He figured up what kind of hardware we would need to secure the brackets to the shelves and drilled holes that size in the metal strips that would go under the shelf.

I then primed and painted all 6 shelves:

And then we started attaching all of the metal strips to the under side of the shelving for support:

 Followed by "L" Brackets on the top of the shelf, which made them end up looking like this once complete:

So basically a screw goes in through the top of the L Bracket, down through the shelf and the metal strip and holds it all together.  It ended up being super strong, which was exactly what we needed in order to mount them like this (from above, and not below). 

And here's a shot with a few dishes just for fun: 

I'm not sure if anything mentioned in this post is normal, but it is my normal...and I love it!