Five DIY Book Rails for Under $10

I usually keep the Peanut's library books on a table in the living room, but it's hard for her to go through the stack to find a book for bedtime that she hasn't read yet.  So I decided to use the less than 2 1/2" inches of space behind her bedroom door to put up book rails. 

My initial thought was to use furring strips which are very economical, but came across 2x2x36 balusters for .89 cents each.  They were the perfect length and depth for what I wanted.  (Keep in mind when buying wood, it's never the size it says.  It's almost always smaller, so measure it before you lug it home.) 

Then I thought I'd get some pretty trim to make the front part of the rail, but trim is surprisingly expensive.  It gives me sticker shock everytime I try to buy it.  So I went back to find the furring strips and stumbled upon these fill strips for .97 cents a piece.

I hate pre-drilling, but wound up needing to pre-drill the holes in the fill strips or they split.  I should've pre-drilled holes in the balusters too, but I was lazy.  Then I screwed the fill strips and balusters to the wall with 3" screws at both ends.  I used a tapping block from my laminate floor installation to keep the fill strip at the same distance from the bottom of the baluster on each rail.  It was tricky holding everything together, making sure it was level and screwing it in by myself, but it was obviously doable. 

In the end I needed 5 balusters and 3 fill strips, totaling $7.36 (not counting tax).  I'm not counting the price of the 3" screws since I bought a 5 pound box ($4.37) and only used ten of them.  And I wasn't going to paint them, but I painted the trim around my front door and used the leftover paint from that.  Since I'm not going to bother figuring out how much the nails and paint added to the total, let's just round up to about $10 for the five.  Pretty good, right?

I don't think it took me more than an hour to put this together.  She loves being able to see all her books without trying to maneuver through a heavy stack, and I love not having to search the house for her books when they're due.

Cooking Spaghetti in a Frying Pan with Cold Water?

We go through a ton of spaghetti in this house.  It's one of the Peanut's favorites, and I get to scrub down the whole kitchen in the time it takes to boil a pot of water.  Then I saw this. 

Holy crap.

Maybe other people knew about this and won't be so excited, but I didn't. Honestly, I thought if you didn't boil a huge pot of water, you'd wind up with a big clump of spaghetti; but, that's apparently, that's not the case.  I didn't time it, but she barely had time to get settled in with her art supplies at the kitchen table before it was done. 

Maybe it's sad, but I feel like this video just changed me life.