I now have a new fascination with hanging things. And it all started in the kitchen!
I have always liked the look of pots and pans hanging from the ceiling. And I have some friends that have a rack in their primitive country kitchen that holds theirs. So, this past few weeks I have been working on putting up a rack for my pans to be suspended from.
I decided to use an old ladder that I had in the wood shop for the project. Two summers ago I used a ladder to suspend my hand tools in the wood shop, so I thought it would work great to use the same structure in the house. First I cut the ladder to the size of the counter. I then burnt eye hooks and S hooks, painted them black, and then installed them on the ladder and on the ceiling. Next, I stained the ladder to somewhat match the cabinets and left room for it to look "farmlike". I purchased some S hooks, burnt the finish off, and left them charred. And on the outside of the ladder I added some oil rubbed bronze coat hooks. And now that it has been up for a few weeks, it seems like it has always been there.
In addition to the ladder in the kitchen, I also installed some laundry lines in the basement and in the family room. Last summer, when I returned after my "visit away from the farm," I had to institute a new set of chores so that the children were not relying on others to do the work that needed to be done. And one of the chores was laundry. It wasn't too much of a mess, but many of the children were complaining that it wasn't getting done in time, and as they have gotten older, they wanted things washed when they wanted them washed. So, I taught the youngers, minus Gresham, how to wash their own clothes, and showed them how to hang them on the line outside to dry. In fact, we didn't use the dryer the whole summer! Since I have done my laundry all my life, and most of that time hung the clothes to dry, I decided to see how long we could go without using the dryer. The laundry lines are helping. It has now been been 5 months and we have not used it yet!
And this is a quick shot of our tree for this year. (for Sherri:) I added some galvanized steel buckets to put some of the newspaper wrapped packages in. Sort of a vintage Christmas look.
