Door knobs and milk bottles

Sometimes you have collections that come together as easily as a big-pieced puzzle.

My porcelain doorknobs were "stolen" from my m-i-l's childhood home. By the time I came into the family, the roof of the place showed more sky than shingles. In some well-traveled places the floorboards were way past squeaky and well into missing entirely.

Bees filled the kitchen cabinets. I know for a fact there were two snakes in the house or one very fast one that traveled from room to room quicker than I did.

And cobwebs. Lots and lots of cobwebs.

Of course, there was no bathroom, only a forked branch of a fallen tree out back. IT Guy told me plenty of stories about that. But what's fun for a small boy is literally a pain in the butt for a grown up!

With its broken steps and sagging floor, the place would have made a great Halloween haunted house if it hadn't been so dangerous.

Trust me, I risked my life getting these doorknobs and one or two of those milk bottles. I needed to make something out of them!


So I removed the metal pieces sticking out of the knobs and replaced them with wooden dowels. I then drilled matching holes in a shelf I had made out of barnwood (OK, I made it out of old fencing but doesn't barnwood sound more...a...well, decorative?) and stuffed the dowel (with glue) into the hole. I sawed off any remaining dowel on the backside of the shelf.

In the winter it's a coat collector. In the summer a hat or two join the old spurs.