Oversize Load

Our long weekend has been split between having fun and getting things done around the house. In the fun department, we saw Bridesmaids last night, and I recommend it highly. Not only is it really funny, but it's also a very honest and realistic story. On Saturday we went to see England's Propeller Theatre Company performance of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors at the Huntington (thanks again, Lisa!), which was all-around excellent.

In the housekeeping department, I'm almost caught up on my laundry, plus I've finished rotating my seasonal clothing into and out of storage. But in the process I did something stupid, and learned a lesson. I have a rolling garment rack in the basement that I use for storing items of clothing that I don't use often. I throw a sheet over it, so it's almost like a pop-up closet. Actually, I already have two of those in the basement; originally I bought this rack to hang drying things, but it morphed into additional storage.

Last year I hung some flannel shirts on the rack, then took them back upstairs when it got cold. Yesterday I took the flannel shirts downstairs and put them on the rack again, and it broke and everything fell onto the concrete basement floor. The rack has a height adjustment at either end, and I suspect it had gotten loose, and then the shirts were too much weight for it. (In between last year and this year I'd added a couple of fairly heavy coats to the rack.)

Amazingly, I was able to balance the cross rod on the remaining portions of the upright poles; the plastic broke in such a way that the pieces left behind are concave, and so they hold the rod in place. This will have to do temporarily until I can replace the rack, but at least the shirts and coats aren't on the dirty floor.

I knew there was a weight limit for this rack, but I never bothered to learn what it was. I'm going to invest in a larger, heavier-duty, all-metal rack with a higher weight limit, so I don't have to worry about this sort of thing again.