Chick in the Styx: Leave Well Enough Alone

Another lifetime ago I worked in the quality department of a large corporation. One of their mantras was "continuous improvement". They felt that everything could & should be improved upon. Sometimes corporate ideology is just wrong ! Take this old mantle/wall shelf that I picked up last year for $2. Sorry, this is obviously a during (stripping) shot, I lost the last two years of pictures that weren't saved on my Picasa Web Album, but it pretty much looked just like this minus the peeling paint. I've had a lot of different ideas for this baby, first I was going to paint it aqua, then I figured it would be great in chalkboard paint which really needs a smooth base, so I went ahead and stripped it.

Here is what it looked like after one coat of heavy duty stripper. People spends hours trying to achieve this look, so why should I try to improve on that? The only thing I did was spray three coats of polyurethane on it to try to seal in the paint (I think it might be lead).

Next, and probably the hardest thing to figure out was what to use for hooks. At first I was just going to use these simple screw in hooks, but they were too plain and too small. Then I thought spoon hooks would look good, but when my hubby tried to flatten the bowl the spoon broke all apart. Seems like the great (hah) set of silver he bought me awhile back is silver plated pot metal. Then my husband suggested railroad ties but we didn't have enough, and they were too long.

So a few days ago I was saying how I wished I had picked up some glass insulators at a sale for $1 a piece (I know...woulda, coulda, shoulda), when a light bulb went off in my husbands head. He goes over to the shop and comes back with these:

Do you know what they are? They are ceramic insulators for electric fencing. We have a bunch that we used to use to keep the deer out of the garden. So a little polishing up, and some 14 cent screws and...