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?

This DIY guitar stand is nothing special, but I thought I’d blog it in case someone else wants to copy my design. Like my toolbox, it’s made entirely out of wood scraps and used hardware. I basically made a large version of a picture frame stand. I used a jigsaw to cut out the feet and glued them to the back pieces. Once the glue dried, I tied the pieces together with some thin-head screws.

I used an old hinge to lock the two pieces together and cut a spare paint paddle to serve as the locking mechanism. This way, the stand will collapse and lay flat if I need to put it up or travel with it.

If there’s a benefit to being married to a woman who has plastic bins filled with fabric tucked away everywhere, it’s that I was able to cut some black velvet to pad the areas of the stand that will touch the guitar.

Here’s how it turned out. If no one’s coming over to our tiny house, I’m just going to leave this thing in the den. I figure the only way I’ll get good at it is by playing when I’m watching TV anyway, so I might as well just leave it there.

UPDATE: While the velvet looked great, it didn’t grip the guitar as tightly as I’d like. I had to set it exactly upright or else gravity would slowly pull the neck to one side. I went out to the garage and opened my old bicycle toolbox for the first time in a few years. I did a stint as a bike mechanic back in my college days. I used to wrap strips of tire tube rubber around my mountain bike frame to protect the paint job from the chain during stressful riding. I cut some new strips out of an old tube and used carpet tacks to adhere them to the guitar stand where the velvet had been.

Now when I set the guitar in the stand, it’s secure and the finish is protected.

As you can see, I have a lot of scrap lumber to work with.

Typically, these kinds of toolboxes are made without hardware as a learning exercise for younger woodworkers. But since I’m completely self-taught and didn’t feel like doing any dovetailing or rabbit cutting, I just used wood glue and screws to assemble it.

I branded the two end-pieces for decoration.

This wooden toolbox is relatively big, but it’ll be easy to throw in the back seat whenever a friend asks me to help him with a project.

Then again, I’d say there’s a 75% chance that the wife will co-opt this for her clay pottery tools.

Now that the wife has a pottery kiln, she’s called dibs on a big chunk of the garage. I’ve promised to build her some storage units for her pottery tools and her own workbench. It’s all just as well; I’ve been meaning to organize the hardware pile and clear some space for years. Ever since I moved to my current house, I’ve been saving jars to use for storage and organization. A year into it, I realized that I had made a mistake. In order for the storage unit to work properly, I have to use only one jar/brand so that the lids are interchangeable. It’s taken me years to eat/collect enough marinara jars, but I finally got around to organizing my excess screws, nuts, bolts, hooks, hinges, etc. Hopefully this will eliminate most of those inconvenient trips to the hardware store for just three or four screws.

The only bottled marinara sauce I buy is Classico’s Four Cheese sauce. That’s what all of these jars were at one point. I’m not an anti-processed-food snob or anything, it’s just that I usually use the sauce as an extender when making my own homemade sauce, and that particular brand/flavor has the right balance for my particular taste. To get the labels off the jars, just fill the sink with really hot water, add a half-cup each of dishwasher and laundry detergent, and soak for a few hours. The labels will slide off on their own and you can remove any stubborn glue with a scrubbing sponge.

I was able to salvage a couple of old kitchen cabinets to flank the jar organizer. When I collect sixteen more jars, I’ll hang two more jar organizers on hinges in front of this one that open like the doors of a refrigerator to reveal what you see here. That should provide all the storage I need for life. Most importantly, this is something I can take with me when I move.

I also got around to fixing my workbench. I had to re-mount the wheels, brace it for better stability, and add a power strip. When the weather’s nice, I like to roll it into the driveway and work under the sun. The power strip makes it convenient to just run one cord to the bench no matter how many tools I’m using. Like I told the wife this weekend, this thing pretty much guarantees I’ll be parking in the driveway instead of the garage no matter where we live. It’s not small.

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.

After removing the old oak slats and replacing them with the salvaged pieces, the floor was a little creaky and uneven despite our best efforts. I added another 30 or so screws to the floorboards until I could step everywhere without the floor depressing more than it does in the rest of the house. Next, I filled all of the holes with oak-colored wood filler.

The only way to smooth out the slats was to sand them into submission with my belt sander. To make quick work of the job, I used a 60 grit belt. It was not only effective at flattening out the slats, but it also pulled every muscle in my body. I felt like a 90 pound girl trying to hold back a hyperactive great dane.

This process blew so much dust into the house that we had to do our Spring cleaning over again. But it really smoothed our the new floor.

Although the belt sander did its job, it left a very rough surface on the floor. After years of woodworking, I’ve come to learn that you need to wet the surface of the wood before you try to sand it to a fine finish. The water not only cleans the dust off, but also stands the grain upright. I’ve made several pieces of furniture that were as smooth as glass until I added a coat of stain. The liquid in the stain stood the grain up and gave me a relatively rough finish that had to be sanded back down, resulting in an uneven color. Another feature of wetting the oak is that you get a glimpse of what it’ll look like when it’s stained. This process revealed that some boards will be darker than I’d hoped.

After spending a couple of days out of town, I returned to finish the floor. I used my hand sander to smooth out the rough-finished slats. I went over and over them with 100 grit and then 150 grit paper. I finished it all up by hand sanding everything with a 220 grit sponge sander. There’s no substitute for using your hands to feel out and smooth the stubborn sections. This put even more dust into the house.

To prep for the stain, I wiped everything down with a damp towel another time. While the floor was drying, I went out to the garage to test Natural and Golden Oak stains on some unused slats. Neither the wife nor I could tell much of a difference between the two colors, so I mixed two parts natural to one part golden oak so that the filler would get a little tint. I put down the stain with an old remnant of a discarded white t-shirt (that’s all I ever use to stain things) and the wife worked behind me wiping the excess off. Fortunately, the color exactly matched the existing stain on boards that I accidentally sanded around the perimeter. Unfortunately, it resulted in a pretty dark color on some of the new wood. I knew this would happen, but it was a little disappointing nonetheless.

The color lightened a little as the stain dried, much to my satisfaction. Next I had to tackle the unfinished filler, which popped out of the wood like a thousand tiny eyeballs. I have a stain marker that’s made for coloring scratches in furniture.

The marker’s pointed tip worked perfectly for coloring the filler. Here’s a before and after picture. You have to strain to find the screw holes.

I’ve decided to wait a few days before I put a thin clear-coat on everything. I want the new slats to get a little worn and lighten up a little first. I might even sand the darker slats a little with my high-grit sponge. The polyurethane will darken it back up. Here’s how it looks now.

When I began this project, I wrote, “I think the reason I let this project linger for so long is because I knew that short of refinishing the floors in the entire house, there was no way I could make new hardwood properly blend in.” As I expected, the new slats look like a patch job. But at least the job was done correctly and it looks professional. It’s kind of charming in a way. Old houses have lots of quirks that give them character. This hardwood patch is yet another quirk. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

You may be wondering how you remove a wood slat from a floor that’s tied into the other pieces with tongue and groove and fastened to the subfloor with nails. The answer is, you do it very carefully.

Set your circular saw to be just barely deeper that the depth of the hardwood slats. You have to cut two parallel lines down the center of the slat and stop the saw just as the blade reaches the joint. Buy a new blade for this process and understand that you’ll slowly ruin it as you inevitably encounter and cut through nails, throwing hot sparks all over the place. Don’t worry about your walls and floor; the sparks only burn your skin (I didn’t realize how warped that rationalization was until I wrote it).

Once you’ve cut the parallel lines in your slat, you can lift and remove the center piece. Now that there’s a channel, you have room to wiggle the tongue side and groove side away from their adjacent pieces and remove them as well.

It’s a tedious process, but it’s not really that difficult. What’s difficult is removing the random nails that remain. (If you were trying to remove a piece of wood from the middle of a floor, you would use this same process, but you’d start by drilling a one inch hole in the middle of the slat and starting your saw cuts from there).

It’s less important that you cut all of the pieces completely, and more important that you stagger the ends. Some of my slats went deep into the bedrooms, so it made more sense to cut them off close to the old vent than to remove the whole pieces. Hence the staggered, almost stair-stepped ends.

Once all of the pieces were cut, I started laying the new slats into the existing holes. To my chagrin, I discovered that the new slats were not quite as thick as the replacements. This was preferable to the new ones being too thick, as I don’t own a planer, but it was a problem nonetheless. The margin was so small (about the thickness of a penny in most cases) that I couldn’t cut shims. The wood just disintegrated. To make matters worse, my subfloor is made up of wooden beams instead of plywood sheets. Some beams were higher than others, making my task even more complex. In some areas, I didn’t need any shims at all. In others, there was a sizable gap.

After a lot of thought, I decided there was only one way to adjust and control the height of the new slats as the subfloor constantly changed depths. My solution gives new meaning to the phrase, putting money into your house.

With wood glue and about three dollars worth of pennies (stacked two or three high in some places), the wife and I were able to cut and lay the new slats flush with the existing floor.

We knew we were almost finished when the only word left was “PROGRESS.”

Because the new slats don’t tie into the existing floor, I had to secure them individually. And since they weren’t flush with the subfloor, I couldn’t glue them (they were, however, glued to the pennies which were glued to the floor). I pre-drilled and inserted trim head screws along the slats to tie them down. I was careful to counter-sink them enough so that they won’t interfere if a future owner decides to refinish the floors.

This step was very rewarding. The next step is to fill the screw holes, sand the filler flush, and restore the wood to match the existing floor as best I can. I know it’ll always look like a patch until someone refinishes the floors in the whole house, but I’m hoping I can get it pretty close.

UPDATE: Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 3

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.

Since I have little patience for useless things in my home and life, I pulled the vent out of the floor, climbed down into the crawlspace (along with the cats, who were ecstatic to discover this secret chamber), and patched the hole with some scrap plywood I had laying around in the workshop. I carefully braced and insulated it and promised the wife I’d eventually get around to patching it. The first time we had guests over, I wrote “WORK IN PROGRESS” on the wood so people would know we don’t think it looks fine as is. Two years later, the writing is almost entirely worn off.

I think the reason I let this project linger for so long is because I knew that short of refinishing the floors in the entire house, there was no way I could make new hardwood properly blend in. As I’ve written before, I hate the thought of doing work that screams “DIY.” But in this case, I really didn’t have much of a choice. I accepted that I would never be able to match the hardwood color exactly, so I decided to strip and lay unfinished slats. The lazy way to patch the hole would be to cut a couple dozen pieces just wide enough to fit in the hole and glue them down. I actually had several handymen/carpenters offer to do this for me for a few hundred bucks. But that method would advertise to everyone that the floor had been patched, even if the stain color matched perfectly. The only way to properly patch the floor was to weave new slats into the woodwork just like the original pieces were laid. That meant removing all the slats that terminated in the old vent opening and replacing them with new wood.

To properly fix the hardwood floor, I divided the project into three steps, each of which would take several hours to complete.

1. Wood Preparation
2. Wood Removal & Replacement
3. Wood Restoration

I recently bought some antique, oak hardwood slats from The Old House Salvage. I have honey oak floors and the natural wood is pretty close to that color (when it’s wet). Unfortunately, some of the scraps I got had been stained a mahogany tint.

To prepare the wood, I had to sand the slats down and remove all the coloring. This was pretty exhausting work, especially in the summer heat.

Next, I had to cut the tongues and the lower groove off of all the slats. In order to set them flush, I had to remove everything but the wooden lip over the groove. Here’s how the slats looked when I bought them.

I really could have used a helper when I was ripping the boards. After a lot of relatively dangerous work with my table saw, here’s what the slats looked like.

Finally, I went over the slats a few times with higher and higher grit sandpaper. Now that it’s all smooth, it’s time to move on to the Wood Removal & Replacement stage. As a precaution, I moved the finished slats into the house so they can adjust to the temperature and humidity for a couple of days.

UPDATE: Patching A Hardwood Floor, Part 2

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.

After filling over the screw holes and painting the wood, I came to the sobering realization that my address sign looked like pure, unadulterated crap. We already had some black street numbers that were posted on a brick column on our front porch, but no one ever saw them from the road. I decided they’d go better on the address marker, but they were too big to fit on the oval face.

I didn’t like the crude look of the oval sign anyway, so I went back to the drawing board. I decided to just go with a rectangular design that would be easier to rout along the edges.

I painted both of the signs and put on a thick clear-coat to protect against the weather. I told the wife she could use the oval one to make a marker for her garden.

It came out pretty good, I think.

Why is it that the mangy animals know when I’m trying to take a good picture? It’s like they’re trying to sabotage it.

I bought a small, solar-powered light to illuminate the sign at night. It works really well. I tried to get a picture without the flash, but it didn’t come out.