As I’ve mentioned before, my family makes Christmas gifts for one another. Last year we made hollow book safes, beaded earrings and teacup candles. The year before that, we made some wine bottle stands and beef jerky. This year, we made chalkboards, barbecue rub, monogrammed aprons, and pottery Christmas tree ornaments.
Woodworking
24
Dec 11
Dec 11
DIY Hanging Chalkboards
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.
19
Jul 11
Jul 11
Homemade Guitar Stand
I bought myself an acoustic guitar for an early birthday present. In an odd coincidence, I just found out that a couple of my oldest friends just started playing within the last few months as well. It must be part of a ⅓-life crisis or something. Anyway, I’m afraid that if I store it in a hard-shell case, it’ll become a pain to get out and put back up. So I decided to make a little stand to keep the guitar conveniently at hand.
14
Mar 11
Mar 11
Wooden Toolbox
As I mentioned before, I’ve been trying to clean up and organize my workshop. As I work on various woodworking projects, I toss the scraps into a bin beneath my workbench. I can pick up the scraps and immediately know if they came from my kitchen island, my coffee table, my guest bedroom furniture, etc. We use this scrap wood when we set up a fire pit in the backyard, but the unseasonably warm weather this year is causing my bin to overflow. So I decided to use some leftover pine and birch to make a travel toolbox.
7
Mar 11
Mar 11
My Workshop
Despite all the furniture I’ve built in my workshop, I never got around to truly organizing it. I built a workbench and hung some tools on the existing pegboard, but I’ve had a huge pile of hardware laying around for years. I could pick up bags and boxes of miscellaneous hardware and tell immediately that it was what I took with me after moving from one apartment in DC to another, or from DC to Greenville.
10
Dec 10
Dec 10
Retro-Looking Christmas Tree Star
After our hefty investment in Christmas supplies last year, the wife and I decided to get a real tree again this year.
6
Jul 10
Jul 10
Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 3
The hardwood patch is pretty much complete. In retrospect, I don’t know what was worse — the sweat sessions that characterized the wood preparation and replacement stages or the non-stop cleaning sprees the wife and I have undertaken throughout the past week.
29
Jun 10
Jun 10
Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 2
Preparing the new wood was labor intensive, but at least there was no chance I would change things for the worse in my house. Once I moved to the ‘removal and replacement’ step, that became a very real possibility. With any DIY project, you run the risk of screwing everything up even worse and paying someone else to fix the original problem and your additional mistakes. Knowing that, I was determined to get this one right. Before I could start working with my new wood slats, I had to remove every piece of wood that made up the old vent hole.
28
Jun 10
Jun 10
Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 1
Like so many houses from the post-war era, our place has a huge hole in the hallway floor where an old oil furnace vent used to be. The furnace has long been drained and filled with sand, but the grate was never removed or replaced.
The old vent was depressed to the point that it seemed unsound, but we eventually learned to walk around it without even noticing it was there. It wasn’t until our first winter in the house when I realized how much cold air was seeping through the porous opening.
24
May 10
May 10
Address Sign
On our block, all of the addresses are painted on the curbs next to the driveway. They’re very faded and it’s almost impossible to discern the street number while you’re moving in your car. Who looks at the curb anyway? Even if someone down the block has noticeable numbers you could use as a benchmark, the randomness of the double-lots would throw you off every time. Whenever we’re having friends over or something is being delivered, we have to tell everyone to look for a green porch swing. I decided to finally make an address marker that would be impossible to miss.
I wanted it to be in the fashion of some of the wrought-iron plaques that some neighbors have, but I wanted to use some of the scrap pine that’s laying around my garage.
