apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Yikes!! I was once carelessly painting a room in Australia on a ladder, and the blade of a stainless steel ceiling fan chopped through my ear cartilage. Fans are dangerous!!!

holy crap! ouch

Doesn't look like the cabinet is an obstruction to the fan any more. :-)

In my previous studio, the landlord had a dishwasher installed in the kitchen. However, they didn't properly measure the cabinetry so the dishwasher stuck out more than it should have. This wouldn't have been a problem except the kitchen was L shaped and the only drawer in the room sat catty corner to ill-fitting dishwasher. This meant that you could only pull the drawer out half way until it hit the buttons on the washer and wouldn't move any more.

It was very a very special studio...that I quickly left after my year lease was up.

Yikes! Often you can buy shorter blades if you want to keep the fan there...

I have a ceiling fan in my kitchen and it has super-short blades. Maybe you can replace just the blades?

It's the first time I've ever had a ceiling fan and I always forget to use it.

My house's previous owner installed curtains on the kitchen windows that stick out a good 4 or 5 inches from the wall. I would knock them down every time I opened the upper cabinets, so I put little-used items behind those dangerous doors.

My brother and I had bunk beds when we were kids, and I remember several times when we wore the telltale forehead bruises from sticking our heads out a bit too far from the top bunk and getting whacked by the ceiling fan.

Ah, memories.

I almost moved in to an apartment where the refrigerator door would hit the island before it opened all the way. That attention to detail was indicative of the craftsmanship around the rest of the apartment and a major reason why I didn't want the place.

I just did this yesterday, moving a floor lamp over to the other side of my bed, forgot about the fan. I now have a floor lamp in two halves. Oh joy.

There are only two drawers in my kitchen, and to open the smaller drawer more than 2", you have to open the oven door. To open the drawer more than 4", you have to turn on the front burner. (The drawer hits the oven door handle, and then the burner knob. But if you turn the burner on, the knob is horizontal, and the drawer slides below it.)

This drives me crazy. I have looked into solutions, but I rent so I'm hesitant to modify anything permanently (like sawing the drawer faceplate) and so far nothing has been workable, so I'm still looking.

Oh dang-I bet that was scary. I installed fans in every room a few yrs back & had to get used to not stretching directly under them :-]

My last apartment had a long narrow kitchen; if the stove door was opened it blocked the entire kitchen. Same thing with the dishwasher. Needless to say it was a one person at a time type of kitchen.

We have precisely the same problem in our dressing room. It is a converted bedroom, and the built-in closet wasn't big enough for all of my wife's shoes, much less her hats. Since we had taken out the master bedroom closet in the master bathroom (don't ask), we needed another "closet".

Fortunately, we had brought back with us from Belgium some modular units that we had bought over there (where they don't have built-in closets). It's constructed kind of like Ikea stuff, but much better quality. We had to have them cut down from their original 2.9m height to fit into our much lower ceilings over here, and pretty much completely filled up the dressing room.

The only design problem is that we didn't consider what would happen with the fan. D'oh!

I've looked for shorter blades. I can't find any that are shorter than the ones we already have, at least not in any local hardware stores. I will keep looking, though.

Make a proper notch for the fan in the cabinet and call it a design piece.

This ceiling fan has backward chain pull. You must pull the chain down 3 times to turn from off to high.