Cabin fever

So I'm well into my second week of sick leave. And I'm bored.

I can't sleep anymore. I just can't. And I've watched more tv in the last few weeks than I think I did all last year. The only upside from that is that I got to watch the entire series of Freaks and Geeks. Do yourself a favour and watch this show. But I digress....

In order to deal with the absolute boredom that is sick leave I started a project.

About a month ago a good friend of mine freecycled to me this old scale.

I instantly fell in love. I mean come on! It's PINK! (not that I necessarily love pink but there is just something so gorgeously retro about pink enamel).

But it was kind of grotty. It had been well loved and used over the years and the pink carpet top was a bit worse for wear and the dust on the inside was so thick that it was hard to see the numbers on the dial. So I decided to give the scale a makeover.

First I scraped the paint splatter from the top of the scale.

Then I took it apart to deal with the dust.

This is what the inside looked like:
And this is what the inside looked like all cleaned up:
And this is what it looked like all put back together: Hello beautiful!

Putting it back together was not as easy as I thought it would be. Basically if you are doing this you need to make sure the 4 arms inside the scale come together (and connect) in the middle. This will ensure that no matter where you step on the scale you will get the same reading. I did not do this the first time. This resource was helpful when I was trying to figure it out.

Once I got that sorted, I got to fixing the top. I pulled off the carpet and then made a new top out of an old shirt I had (that had a rip in it I couldn't fix), the stuffing from an old pillow and some cardboard.

Here's a montage of how that went:


And here's the finished product:

I'm not entirely satisfied with it though and I'm not sure why. Perhaps the top is too puffy? OR maybe its that too much of the pink enamel is covered up? Or maybe it's the fabric? If I was buying new fabric I'd have bought something white with big pink and maybe turquoise polka dots. But anyway, it will certainly do for now.

Most important is the reason I got it in the first place. To weigh my garbage. Yep, that's right, a full year into the Riot and I'm only now getting around to weighing my garbage. Don't worry, I'm not going to put the garbage on my pretty scale. I'm going to put me on the scale while I'm holding the garbage. First official garbage weigh in will be this Sunday.