Habemus plus vis computatoris quam Deus

In the continuing fixing up of stuff around the new house (well, new-ish; we've been here seven months now), the blue bathroom gets the handyman love this week.  There's three bathrooms in this house, one on each floor.  The blue bathroom is the one on the middle floor.  The towel rail pulled off the wall — or, more exactly, off its mounting brackets — on Monday.

You've all seen these things before — flimsy bits of bent sheetmetal (but it's chrome-plated sheetmetal!) on ill-fitting brackets.  This being the 21st century, no less than three methods are used to mount this advanced, high-tech, shiny, chrome-plated piece of junk to each of its mounting brackets:  a set-screw, a wish, and a prayer.  The setscrews failed because they won't align correctly to get a decent purchase on the edge of the bracket, and the other two plus ninety-nine cents will get you a cup of MacDonalds coffee.  Just to make things more interesting, as is common with such junk, the brackets were only screwed into drywall¹ — and with overly-soft slotted-head wood screws that deform from the screwdriver blade, at that.  Nor should it come as a surprise that not one screw was put in straight.

Here's the replacement, at right.  It's screwed directly into the studs in the wall with four-inch deck screws, is wide enough to hold two bath towels without folding them, has three coats of polyurethane to keep moisture out of the wood — INCLUDING the cut ends against the wall — and best of all, is made entirely of materials left over from other jobs.  The last coat of polyurethane went on yesterday evening, and I just fitted it this morning.²

At left, a different view with detail of the end brackets.  Full-size images are, as usual, behind the thumbnails.

The last project before this was removing and completely remounting the toilet in the yellow bathroom, on the bottom level, which was leaking badly at the wax ring; and, on the same weekend, sanely rewiring all the outlets in our bedroom on the third floor.  Not only were three of the four pairs of electrical outlets in the room switched, they were all connected to the same set of two-way switches.  To make matters worse, the two-way switches had been wired incorrectly so that they were in effect acting as two single-pole switches in series.  Just to add surrealism, all the original outlets were worn out to the point they wouldn't hold a plug in; instead of simply replacing the outlets, an additional outlet had been wired onto the end of the chain in a junction box just screwed to the wall on top of the panelling.

After rewiring, that outlet box (which the headboard lights plug very conveniently into) is properly flush-fitted, and it's the only switched one now; all the other outlets are now unswitched, so that we can plug things like, oh, say, alarm clocks into them.  And naturally, yes, I replaced the worn-out outlets.  I'm progressively replacing almost every outlet in the house.

[1]  Well, OK ... two of the four screws probably went almost half an inch into the stud behind.  Color me impressed.  Not.

[2]  Yes, I've subsequently moved the TP holder.