Obsession Thursday: Conquering slipperyness

Who puts a window INSIDE a shower? Well, it’s mine and I’m gonna keep it clean, dangit.

You may think this post is about knitting. It is not. It is about sticking things to a tiled surface.

Said tiled surface, in this case, is the wall of my shower. And everyone knows you knit happier when you’re clean. Whatever. Work with me here, people.

So I have a completely tiled shower with a big inset window. And everyone in the building puts their shampoos and stuff on that window ledge. I don’t like. It’s messy and unsightly and a breeding ground for mold.

Instead, I wanted to hang up my shower-stuff rack. Maybe it could hang from the shower head, but I don’t find that logical. Don’t want to reach through a stream of water to get at my stuff. The opposite wall is where it belongs. But with a fully tiled wall — HOW?

Stupid stupid stupid things. Great when they work. But they often don’t.

Attempt 1 (and 2 and 3): Command hooks. Prepped the surface properly, let it cure for a few days and was thrilled to see it work, for 6 months. Then it failed at 3 am. CRASH BOOM BANG.

Unimpressed.

Prepped attempts 2 and 3 properly as well (including cleaning the wall fully and letting the hook tape set for more than 48 hours before putting weight on the hook). Same thing. Command hooks, you have betrayed me one time too many. You are dead to me.

Then I remembered something I’d seen on a recent shopping trip. A ridiculously over-engineered bit of brilliance. Look at this thing:

Meet Immeln. Which, as far as can tell, means absolutely nothing in Swedish but seems to have its etymological roots in the word for “fog”. Which is kind of appropriate.
This is another really long caption, isn’t it?

What you have here is Immeln, a line of suction-cup-based hooks by IKEA. What you can’t see is that it works like this:

1. Unscrew the white knob thingy in the front.

2. You will have 3 pieces. A suction cup with a big metal washer and screw in the center, the long white plastic hooky thing and the front white knob thingy that you screwed off in the first place.

3. Clean the surface. (Duh.)

4. Press the suction cup thingy on the wall. Pressy pressy pressy all around the edge of the suction cup thingy to fully adhere it. It’s already a little sticky, too.

5. Cover with the long white plastic hooky thing.

6. Screw the white knob thingy back on. Tightly.

What’s happening? Is that as you screw the thing together, the suction cup is being activated big time as its center is pulled away from the wall. But the outside stays stuckified.

It’s genius. And it’s working.

There’s a whole line of Immeln bathroom stuff, with attached baskets, mirrors and towel rods — but the hooky part they’re currently selling looks very little like the pictures on the IKEA website. I think they’ve done some redesign of the over-designed thingy into its current state, which is fine with me. I’ll gladly pay $9.99CDN for two hooks that actually, really work (that was the price I paid yesterday — not sure why the website is outdated. How very un-IKEA of them!).

Anyway, back to my triumphant success. Wanna see?

Ta-daaaa! Yes, now you can see my bath products. I don’t think that’s a huge invasion of privacy. It’s not like there’s a bottle of Joe’s Anti-Foot-and-Mouth-Disease body wash on there or nuthing.

Signed,

Your clean and non-frustrated Editor.

P.S. Jillian says I don’t have to write such long blog posts. I keep trying. I’m not doing very well at the brevity part yet.