Most people think that DIY is always cheaper. It’s been my experience that the reverse is usually true. Almost all of the furniture I make costs double what I’d pay at a big box store. The same holds true for most of the clothes the wife makes at home. The only way DIY saves money is in bulk production. When you make a dozen or more of the same gift, the per-item cost is usually lower than anything you’d pay at a store.

We made a dozen of these chalkboards (click here to learn more):

And we made a dozen of these spice rub jars (click here to learn more):

I also made this guitar stand for my brother-in-law:

Oh, and the wife made this sock animal dinosaur for our youngest nephew. She got the pattern from a book called Stray Sock Sewing, Too: More Super-Cute Sock Softies To Make & Love.

And she made a bunch of these Christmas tree ornaments for family and friends. The pottery kiln can churn out cheap and easy gifts.

I should also mention that we buried a cat (Jasmine) over Thanksgiving and the wife didn’t want to look at my old cat food station for two anymore. So I made this smaller cat food station for Crew, the wife’s 12 year old cat who got grandfathered into our marriage:

As a way to cut down on the amount of money spent at Christmastime (and to limit the amount of useless crap we each accumulated), my family decided to start making gifts a few years ago. It was touch and go for a while, but thanks to creative online showcases like Pinterest, the quality of gifts has dramatically increased lately. This year, we made these chalkboards for some of the ladies on both sides of our families.

About a month ago, the wife saw this page in a magazine:

She pointed to the chalkboard and suggested that we make something similar for our homemade Christmas gifts. I’m not sure if she really liked this idea or just wanted to outsource most of the gift-making to me this year, but they came out great. The best part is that they were pretty cheap to make. The project only requires some basic carpentry skills and a little patience.

Here’s what you need:

• 2 1/4″ x 2′ x 4′ sheets of oak plywood ($32)
• 1 quart of tinted Zinsser primer ($13)
• 1 quart of chalkboard paint ($13.50)
• 150′ of rustic-looking rope (from Ace Hardware, $7)
• 1 ball of twine ($2.50)
• 12 pieces of chalk ($2)

Each sheet of plywood gets cut into six rectangles that measure 12 x 18 inches each. I used a table saw, but a hand-held circular saw would work just as well. I pre-primed the wood to speed the process along.

Next, I used my miter saw to cut some angles for decoration, and then ran a router around the top edge. You can omit this step, but it adds a nice touch. I routed a 45-degree angle on half of them and cut a simple quarter-round on the rest. Here’s a closer look.

Next, you drill two holes in each chalkboard. Make sure you drill through the board and into a piece of scrap wood or the back will splinter. I used a 5/8″ forstner bit because I wanted the holes to be big (and clean), but you could use a smaller-diameter twist bit if that’s all you have.

Finally, you prime the boards and then paint them with the chalkboard paint. I remembered to brand the back of each chalkboard.

Knot some rope through the holes and tie a piece of chalk to some twine and you’re done.

I was worried that the chalk would be hard to erase from the valleys in the grain of the wood, but it comes right off.

Cost breakdown: $60/12 = $5 per chalkboard.

You actually have enough paint to more than double the scope of the project. Even if you bought two of everything besides the paint, the per-unit price would drop to around $4. That means you would have two dozen go-to gifts in your closet that are good for any occasion. Plus, you don’t need to buy a card because you can write a greeting right on the gift. How easy is that?

As I’ve mentioned before, my family makes gifts for one another each Christmas. This year, I decided to make book safes for the guys.

This is a pretty simple project. The steps take some time, but there’s nothing particularly difficult to do. Buy a hard-cover book for a buck at the thrift store. I bought six with the intent to make five safes.

Lay the pages on any wax paper-lined surface with an edge. Pin the first few pages of the book to the front and rear covers and weigh the rest of the pages down so they don’t move.

Mix some glue and water together. I used about a 4:1 ratio of wood glue to water (if you’re making one book, you should mix one tablespoon of glue with 3/4 teaspoon of water). Glue the outer edges of the pages together with a brush to ensure that the pages don’t move when you cut them out later on.

When you’ve put on a thick coat, unclip the covers and let the rear cover hang off the edge. Place some wax paper between the clean pages/front cover and the glued pages to separate them. Weigh down the book so the wet pages don’t wrinkle and swell.

After a couple of hours, put on a second coat of glue and let it dry overnight. Don’t throw the wax paper away after this step. You’ll use it later on. The glue dries pretty clear and should hold the pages firmly.

To cut out the cavity, use a metal ruler to make straight cuts with an Xacto knife. Buy extra blades; it’s worth it. After you’ve cut fifty pages or so, you can stop using the ruler. This is tedious work, but you have to be patient and take your time or else the cuts will become uneven and angled. Go into this step knowing it’ll take about forty-five minutes to finish.

When you get near the bottom cover, insert a sheet pan or something else you don’t mind scraping up between the pages and the back cover. This is to keep the inside of your book nice and neat.

Once the cavity is cut out and you’ve cleaned up the edges with your Xacto knife, it’s time to glue again. Mix another batch of the glue/water mixture. Put your book back on the wax paper with the bottom cover hanging over the edge. Brush the glue all over the inner pages. If you glued the back cover to the pages now, the excess glue would pool inside your safe.

The glue will hide most of your imperfections when it dries. Put on a thick coat and place the wax paper between the glued pages and the clean pages/front cover. Let it dry overnight under a heavy weight, just like before.

The next day, all you have to do is glue the back cover to the glued pages and glue the first clean page over the cavity to hide your errant cuts. Weigh the book down again and let the glue dry for a few hours. When the glue is dry, cut the top page to reveal the cavity.

Fill your book safe with anything you want to hide and place it between other books on your shelf. No one will be the wiser.

Obviously, this is more of a novelty than a secure safe, but it’s a cool and cheap project that makes a great gift. If you were really trying to make a foolproof safe, you could use velcro or magnets to ensure that if a thief knocks everything off your shelves, your book safe wouldn’t open to reveal your valuables. If I had a scroll saw, I could have done this project in a fraction of the time and cut the cavity into any shape I wanted, like this guy did.

In case you were wondering, the wife made gifts for the girls. She made beaded earrings and candles out of old teacups.

This year, I bought a really small tree. We learned our lesson after I trimmed away $25 worth of needles last year to make it fit in our tiny house. This tree is so small that I had to put it on a pedestal and cover it up with a skirt.

We decided the tiny ornaments we used to hang on our table-top tree in DC are too small for a real tree, so we decorated with a bunch of ornaments from our childhood. There are giant balls that feature Snoopy, Mickey, and the Pink Panther. It looks pretty retro, so we decided it would look even better with a retro-looking star on top. So I went out to the garage, cut up some scrap plywood, and glued it into a 1950s-looking Christmas tree topper.

I glued a clothes pin to the back, spray-painted it silver, and clipped it to the top of our tree.

I think it looks pretty apt, but we’ll buy or make a real one next year. I’d go whole hog and load this thing up with tacky silver tinsel but I’m afraid the cats would choke to death, thereby making the wife a very unhappy camper, and possibly ruining bowl season for me. So no tinsel.

We don’t decorate a lot besides throwing some lights on the front porch shrubs and hanging the stockings on the mantle. By the way, how funny is it that I have a wife who sews, but we have buttons on our stockings instead of embroidery?

We need to update the pictures in the buttons. Those fresh, young faces just remind us how much we’ve aged over the past few years.

I guess Louie the Lightning Bug didn’t visit the schools in Pelzer?

Here’s the back story on how this odd tradition started. They were pretty nice people, and they seem to have inspired many of their neighbors to follow suit. Check out this house:

Clark Griswold, eat your heart out!

On a whim, the wife decided we needed a real tree this year. Like always, that impulse cost us a small fortune. Not only did we have to pay for an eight foot Frazier fir, but we also had to buy a tree stand, skirt, lights, topper, and some grown-up ornaments. We own several ornaments, but most of them are those little Hallmark collections that celebrate cartoon characters. You know, tiny Peter Pans and Tiggers and R2D2s and all the other symbols of the dreaded Consumer/Entertainment Complex. They’re just too small for a big tree. So after burning a few hundred bucks, we opened our arms and hearts to this slowly dying plant that will leak sap and shed needles all over my hardwood floors for the next five weeks.

UPDATE: The topper didn’t seem to fit with our other decorations, so I made a retro-looking star out of some wood scraps in my workshop.

They dropped a lot of hints that they wanted them for Christmas, but I didn't feel like paying $43 a piece for these tiny things.  Plus, the store only had them in stained oak, and my in-laws have white rocking chairs.  So I decided to make my own.

Here is my version:

Here they are after a few coats of white paint:

Here’s the padding. I could have used a third hand here:

And here’s the finished product:

I was in a rush, so I didn't do any decorative work or routing.  And next time I’ll lower the lateral brace so it better stabilizes the joint.

They seem to defy gravity.

I got this branding iron from the aptly named Custom Branding Irons:

Here are the wine holders, cut out and branded with my new woodworking logo. I have a propane torch to get it searing hot, but the lazy side of me decided it was easier to just heat it up on the stove and press it into the wood on the kitchen floor. With more practice, I think I'll be able to get an even sear:

They're all made of oak, but we went with mahogany and cherry finishes. Here's the finished product:

Everyone got one of these wine holders and a bottle of the Biltmore vineyard's Christmas Wine.

If you’d like to make your own, I used standard 1″ x 4″ oak cut to about 15″ in length. The 1 1/2″ hole is cut about 3″ from the top, and the angle on the bottom is 22.5°. If you’re going to take the time to make one, you might as well make several. You’ll probably have to adjust the angle slightly according to the length and weight of the wood, so have a bottle handy and test your first one before making the rest.

Maybe I’ll try this design next time.