Yup. Some nice flowers coming your way if you give it proper care. These guys are pretty tough, have fun!

I have four dumbbells, and made a basement rack out of 3/4" plywood for them. Two of my three barbells are downstairs. But it turned out that I really needed two dumbbells upstairs. I have not made a rack for them yet. I already had many wood DIY shelf units, so a space was found between two existing shelf units that was just large enough for the barbells. This way I did not have to worry about attaching to a wall. I just screwed two pieces of plywood to the existing shelves. They already had four cut outs for my four dumbbells to be slip into. Six screws did the trick, it rests on the floor. My dumbbells are the Wal-Mart screw on type that take plates. Since I keep wood scraps it didn't cost anything to make the rack.

Is it for display or dish draining? If for draining wet dishes (that get later put away in cupboards) then I think that function would outweigh any drawback - assuming you had thought through any downsides to drips off the wet plates. (Some people would go nuts with dripping/spotting issues.) However if for display purposes I would think twice. I know at my sink I often have lots of steam (dumped pasta water, for example) and from daily hand dishwashing, a lot of potential for stray droplets of water/soap to fly around. (I use my hand sprayer for really hot rinses of stuff in the drainer rack fairly often and it splashes.) I also wash everything by hand not liking a DW, so YMMV. My final issue is that unless everything is used every day you are setting yourself up for having to re-wash each time before reuse. That's what happens in my house to open-stored stuff. It's one thing to have to rewash essentially display pieces every now and then. But for stuff I might use to get out a meal, I want to know it's ready for use before I reach for it. If it needs rewashing, again, sometimes I just feel like throwing it across the room instead! Maybe if I used a DW it wouldn't bug me so much - but one trip through the washing process per item per use is my hard limit. I have had open storage of dishes and cookware on shelves, plate racks (both over sink) and a pot hangar for a couple of decades and in my new kitchen there won't be any of it, if I can help it. I was beguiled by the look, but in practice I loathe it. And since I've been looking at it since the late 1980s, it looks pretty passe to me, despite it's current flash of popularity. (Probably seems trendy to all those people who have had -quite sensibly - closed or fitted kitchens up till now.) My kitchen is an historically unfitted one (same as it was in around the time of the Civil War). As for your question of depth. My own above-sink open shelves are 12" deep and while I don't find them troubling, my much-taller DH does. They are up about 24" (I'll be glad to measure if that's important) from the counter. Fifteen inches would seem to me to be encroaching and would be much more troubling to my DH; assuming I liked the look and function of the set-up I have now, I would be looking at making it narrower, not deeper. HTH, L.

Pam, I, too, read it for a group discussion. I didn't think it was padded, but one of our number thought she saw an editor's touch and felt it was very much a check-list kind of memoir. I did not. I thought it was written as unsentimentally as possible. She didn't judge her parents and she didn't wallow in the misery of her upbringing. I've actually known a couple of people not so different from the author and the stories were very familiar to me. The hiding out in the bathroom to avoid other kids seeing that she never had food for lunch made me ache because I remember my friend telling me the same story. (Said friend has turned into a workaholic who brings home a seven figure income, but she still struggles with the issues.) Another friend depended upon the goodness of school friends and their mothers to survive and she went on to get a couple of ivy league degrees and a successful career, so that part of it was entirely believable to me also. People can overcome their beginnings and thrive. In short, this all rang true and unexaggerated to me.