We Got Wood!

we recently took delivery of a couple of rather nice bits of furniture which Hev had purchased with her inheritance from her Grandpa: a cinnamon fruitwood (it says here...) sideboard and shelves.

We've both placed items in the dining room, which is becoming our room of quality wood.

This has also inspired me to put my our African mask collection up where we've always planned: above the nice new sideboard in the dining room.

I"ve been putting it off for ages, as I wanted to mount the mask slightly away from the wall (for that floaty effect), which is quite tricky, and of course I'm rubbish at DIY.

A plan is a plan however, so after some experimentation I produced a prototype involving a hook with a spacer rod/screw positioned ~six inches below it, padded with cardboard and ripped up bedsheets, to hold the lower half of the masks away from the wall, which seemed to do the job.

A working prototype produced, I set about putting all seven masks up. There was one tricky bit, in that I wanted to mount a mask below a light fitting and i wasn't sure where the wires went. However, Hev's dad to the rescue! Apparently you can use a MW radio to detect wires with current them. This seem to work (hurrah!) and even better, the wires went up (hurrah!)

To top it all off, I managed to put all seven masks up without any major cock-ups, injuries, swearing episodes, which is really a miracle in itself...

So here are my before and after photos:

before

after

Apologies for the boring details, but I'm ridiculously proud of my finest (and only) DIY hour...

...and the masks themselves, of course...