That won't go on This Old House...

I was cleaning the kitchen today and noticed something odd about our table in there. First, one of my previous roommates took a perfectly good round table and cut it in half, and then bolted one side to the wall. I'm sure she saw it in some DIY home magazine and maybe it worked all right in the picture, but it's an awkward thing in the kitchen: too low to prepare food on, and too small for more than one person to sit at, even assuming they liked the direct view of the wall. So it mostly just collects junk, and the only practical purpose I've been able to direct to it is using it to make coffee. But any time I really think about it, I just say to myself, "what was she thinking here...".

This was the same roommate who decided she didn't watch enough TV to merit paying her share of the cable bill... while she still had a digital converter box in her room.

But back to the odd thing about the table: cleaning the floor underneath it, I checked out how it was attached to the wall: two little right-angle braces are screwed into the wall on the bottom side of the table. But the marvelous part is that they're not attached to the table. At all. They could be screwed in, but they're not. One has even slipped upside-down, since each one is only attached with a single small screw (instead of two, like the brace is designed for). So all that's keeping the table from falling over is its own weight, pressing against the wall.