I’ve been working from home since the pandemic, and my desk area is a little bit crowded – I’ve got a big monitor attached to my work laptop as a second screen, my keyboard and my home Mac Mini, a backup drive and my mousing area, plus two pen cups, notepads, some miscellaneous moisturizers and knickknacks, and scissors as well as clippers for the cats’ claws. I am definitely in need of a little more space, but my desk is the size my desk is, and I don’t want to replace it. Time for an organizer, preferably one that can hang on the wall so it doesn’t take any desk space itself.

I started by looking on Amazon and Etsy for ideas of shapes and structures, and found this amazing piece. I really liked the circular structure with the shelves projecting out from it, particularly since the circle echoes the cat tree platforms and mobile that are also in my studio space.

To figure out the size, I laid out the main items I wanted to get off the desk: two pen cups, my fountain pens (which do better stored horizontally), and the scissors. I made a cardboard mockup first, so I traced around the pen cups and my fountain pens to estimate the shelf sizes, and then figured out how big the backing circle should be to hold those shelves. Once I had a size and configuration I liked, I moved on to building it in wood.

I wanted a little bit of fancy detail – an inlay strip of mahogany I had left over from an earlier project, just to give it something a little special. So I sketched some rough layouts for the shelves, pegs to hang scissors from, and the stripe, to figure out which one felt balanced.

Then I cut the circle out of some leftover birch plywood with a jigsaw, routed a thin groove into it, and glued my inlay in. I tested a few pen tray ideas in some scrap pine, as well.

I got to buy a new router bit for the pen grooves, which is always fun. I actually got two new bits on this project, since I bought a keyhole bit so I could hang it flush to the wall. I went ahead and cut the hanging holes before I started working on the shelves.

Once I had the inlay in, I realized it might look nice to have the shelves also be mahogany, to make a more intentional two-toned look. So I bought a couple of mahogany boards, one thick enough to rout pen grooves into, that was also big enough to provide the bottom of the second shelf, and one thin one for the walls of the second shelf. Then I cut the shelves to size, routed the pen grooves and a small “dish” into one of the boards, and attached the walls to the second shelf. The shelves also both have a notch taken out of the back edge so that I could attach them to the base in a routed slot.

I added three dowel pegs under the first shelf to hang stuff off of – they’re pine since I don’t have mahogany dowel, and I kind of like how they came out. I also did a little pine dowel detail on the second shelf, drilling three holes through the front wall into the shelf base, so it echoes the three pegs under the first shelf – sadly, the pine end grain doesn’t show as much contrast to the mahogany as I’d hoped. Ah well, I’m always learning.

Once I’d tested the fit of the shelves, I realized that the whole piece would look nicer if I edged-banded the plywood circle – so I bought mahogany edge banding as well and ironed it on.

Then I varnished all the pieces – separately, since I decided I’d like the possibility of switching out the shelves at some point in the future. Once everything dried, I put it all together, hung it on the wall, and loaded it up! It’s working beautifully so far.

I have another invisible house success to check off my list – I finally reversed the basement door! I’ve lived in this house for four years, and the basement door swings the wrong direction – it swings out, over the stairs, so if you’re coming inside from the basement/garage, you have to stand on the third step down, open the door towards yourself, and then continue up the stairs. This is entirely against all building codes, not to mention common sense. I know why they did it – if it swings into the kitchen, it interacts with both the back door and the doorway into my studio. But I never use the back door, and I don’t mind it blocking the studio doorway for a moment.

So over the weekend I spent 4 hours to switch the door: taking the door down, re-chiseling the hinge spaces on the door and the doorframe, hanging the door and sanding down a couple spots so it would actually close, re-setting the strike plate, and finally reattaching all the trim for the doorstop. This involved a router for the hinge recesses, plus a chisel to make sharp corners, a sander to shave down the edge of the door, a drill for all the new holes, and a vacuum cleaner to deal with all the sawdust I created. Power tools are the best. Also, wrestling a door into place alone is not an experience I would recommend to anyone (particularly if said door leads to a flight of stairs), but I succeeded in re-hanging it anyway. And now I have a door that opens in the correct direction!

When I redid the kitchen, there were a couple of things I just didn’t think about – I hadn’t really considered whether having a phone jack where there had always been a phone jack made any sense, since I don’t use a landline. I also ended up removing two wall outlets, because I built a banquette seat over them. But that phone jack has just stayed on the wall, empty and useless, for two years now. So I figured, maybe it’s time to remove that. And while I was going to be patching wall, maybe I should fix the outlet in the living room, and take out the phone jack that’s attached to a baseboard in there, and maybe even move the coat hook rail that’s placed in such a way that it covers up a lightswitch, leading guests to have no idea how to turn off the living room light. Don’t you love project creep? My one little phone jack removal suddenly became four different little projects. But that was fine – at least I’d only have to get the wall paint out once.

So I took out the phone jacks, and replaced the outlet, and took down the coat hook rail, and patched all the holes. And then I went to put the coat hook rail up in a new spot, and realized that the 4-hook rail I had looked kind of puny in the new place. I figured a bigger one in the same style probably existed, so I’d just go buy that. What I had was dark wood with dark bronze hooks, which I liked well enough. But after visiting three different stores, all I could find in the store were white with white hooks, dark wood with chrome hooks, or white with bronze or chrome hooks. (If you had asked me before yesterday if I cared about the finish colors on my coat rack, I would have laughed at you. Now I suddenly have very strong opinions.) BUT! Home Depot had individual hooks, including nice dark bronze ones. And I have a lot of scrap wood and a lovely clean workbench. So I bought five hooks and brought them home, and spent a couple hours cutting a piece of wood to the right size, sanding the old varnish off it, routing the edges, and staining it. Of course, then the stain needed to dry, so I had to wait a day to seal it with polyurethane.

In the meantime, I painted all the spackled spots where I’d fixed holes in the walls, which look great. The next day, I was going to poly my coat hook rail… but it turned out my poly container didn’t get closed fully the last time I used it, so it was a solid instead of a liquid. Oops. That provoked another trip to the home improvement store – luckily, I also decided to test out one of the hooks to see how it would look on the rail, and discovered that I had to buy shorter screws as well, since the ones that came with the hooks were too long – they’d go all the way through the rail, not just into it. Unhelpful! One trip to Lowe’s later, I had liquid poly and screws of the correct length. So after sealing the rail and installing the hooks, I could hang the coat rack on the wall, and hang all my coats back up. This whole project was the kind of thing that no one else will ever notice, but makes me happier with my house in general.