Be Excellent To Each Other

When you've painted a wall, and are all ready to put the shelves back up, what's the best way to ensure the walls are not still wet?

A towel.

Stop talking dirty to them.

Lick it.

By throwing a tub of glitter at them, if it sticks then it's still wet.

Touch them with your fingers.

Throw spaghetti at the wall, if it sticks it's ready.

Perform an ancient Native American raindance and see if the walls are any wetter than they were before.

Check whether they are not still wet. If they are not not still wet, then they are still wet.

If the walls are still wet, try making them not still being wet.

If they are neither dry nor wet, you've done it wrong.

If the wall isn't wet, are you sure you painted it?

Thankyou. You have all cheered me up

Thread about paint drying 100% more interesting than those about electrical plugs, or three letter acronyms shock.

You created this thread solely for the purpose of that joke, didn't you?

Yes.

One day you'll need help for your wet wall problem and no one will reply to you because of this.

Stop watching it?

You've definitely cried "wet wall" here. I hope nobody helps you with your genuine wet wall problems next time around.

According to my friend Usborne:

"This is easy. Use your eyes."

Is it dry yet?

Keep watching.

Wait a minute - who cars if it's still wet. Put the shelves up anyway.

Q: How many beexers does it take to put up a set of shelves?

Hnnnghhhgghghgh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Leave it until either:
a) a week has passed
or
b) you can be arsed.
- whichever comes later.

Far better to leave the shelves standing on one end, leaning against the wall. This is so that in the middle of the night they can topple over with a resounding crash and scare the shit out of you.

We had a big, heavy mirror spontaneously fall off of the wall one night. I have never been so instantaneously wide awake from a sleeping state. We sat bolt upright, eyes wide in the dark (pointlessly as I am completely blind in low light), shaking and saying 'what was that?!'. I was the brave one that went to investigate in the nude.

Last year, an entire bookcase I'd made and put up - about 6' x 5' with probably 100kg of books and stuff on it fell off the wall at 4am. It sounded like a truck had smashed through the sitting room window. It had been up for about six years I hasten to add

We have a basket in the shower held up by suction cups. Every so often it falls. I jump out of my skin without fail every time.

Mimi: Why go naked? I mean, it's more exciting to wander into danger WHILE naked (double the excitement) but don't you have a dressing gown or something?

Dave: Yeah, I heard our 'floating' Ikea shelves in the spare bedroom giving up late one evening while I was sitting in bed. I had just time to run in and hurriedly remove the contents (her collection of incredibly heavy Stephen King books) before they tore chunks out of the wall. I was reminded of my own childhood floating Ikea shelves which I arranged my toy cars on... late one night the same thing happen, and they all clattered deafeningly onto my desk, scaring the crap out of me. A nice chunk of plaster came too, still attached to one of the screws.


Malabar: Why not get rid of it then? I'd become paranoid about the frights and get all anxious. I honestly had trouble sleeping for the last few months in my flat because of the fire alarm. Not so much because there could be a fire (though there was, once) but because it was so impossibly loud that it took 20 minutes to put one's skin back on, so thoroughly would you jump out of it.

Why is it the women who always end up having to do that (be brave, not walk around starkers)? I remember that earthquake from a couple of years ago; I just stuck my head under the covers as I thought I was dying. Ange got up and went outside to find out what was going on.

Floating shelves are a menace. They look nice, but you have to remember they are essentially very, very weak by design. They're only really suitable for ornaments.

Because the bastard in me thinks it's worth it just to have everyone else react the same way.

We need the storage, though. We've got one of the shelves that hooks onto the top of the shower cube, but now there doesn't seem to be any room for anything other than the suction-cupped thing. We could stop being lazy and take everything we need into the shower with us, I guess.

What's a floating shelf?

Yeah. I should really get around to taking down the two that are above our guinea pig cage.

One with no visible brackets. They have a metal backplate that screws into the wall and has a few prongs that project into the body of the shelf.

Edit -- I have two in my kitchen but they just have a few pictures and a small iPod speaker system on them. Even so, I keep an eye on them.

Hovershelves from the year 5000.

Anyone see that home improvement show where they installed a set of 'floating on wires from the ceiling shelves' to put the ladies lifelong collection of novelty tea pots on?

The whole lot came smashing down on the floor.

For the terminally nosey, here's my dining room, sort of -- that's a pic from the particulars from when we bought the house, so it's the previous owners stuff. I put floating shelves back up where those two are though so it looks similar.

8 chairs, for you, the boys and Snow White?

Ah, them. I have these:



They seem to be excellently sturdy.

Hah. The Egg had two of those lying around when I was there on the weekend, ready to be put up; I commented that they looked nice, and as you say, stronger than the £15 Ikea/Argos floating shelf.

I have a nice set of small ones in the hall - their size means they are inherently more stable, and also difficult to get enough on them to overload them. One has a telephone cradle, one has a router, and the other has a bowl of pot pourri. I don't think I'd trust floating shelves with anything more that that.

They're excellent, though I don't know if I picked up the right shelf/bracket combination, as there's a lot of free play (as you can see). They do the job though.

IKEA's CD/DVD shelves are ace, too. And if you hold them by their brackets, you can use them as metal pugil sticks.

I've got a load of those brackets which I bought last year - I didn't use them in the end. The ones I have are a metal bracket you screw into the wall - it's about 65mm wide, 20mm high and 8mm deep. It has a threaded hole in the centre you screw a solid metal bar which is 12mm dia and 110mm long. They can be quite secure for reasonable weights provided the wall is solid and you're sure. It was a combination of knowing this to not be the case in my old house and the problem of not having a column drill to make the holes in the edges of the shelves - which obviously have to be really thick - like 30mm at least IIRC, that put me off using them - hell, I don't even think the wall was level, which would have made it impossible to actually mount the shelf with all the brackets sticking out at varying approximations of the perpendicular.

Edit. Here are the brackets I bought.

Heh, I have the exact same arrangement in my hall. It's where my keys and wallet and spare change live.

It's not, wuss