We don’t have a lot to report. We’ve been hosting people in and out of the house a lot lately, and that trend will continue throughout the summer. After work last week, my wife and I found some time to cut and install the baseboards. Some of the cuts were difficult, especially where the cabinets meet the walls next to the stove. They still need a couple of coats of glossy white paint, but getting this trim work on the walls covered up the last traces of the old room:
When we lived in our tiny basement apartment on Capitol Hill, we had to maximize every inch of space. We had a little patio that was sunken beneath the deck in the back yard, and there was a space that was too low to stand, but just right for sitting. So when the wife (the fiancée at the time) was out of town planning our wedding, I made her this porch swing as an engagement present:
Actually, I presented it as a swing that would go with the porch on a house I would buy for her someday.
We’re finally close to finishing the front porch. After we built a side table and footrest to go with our rocking chair, all we had left to do was build some planter boxes to flank the steps and give us a little privacy. I took care of that this past weekend. This was the original plan:
It’s designed to look like the terracotta pot is suspended by the upper lip, but it’ll really be sitting on cross bars inside the box.
My wife and I bought an Adirondack-style rocker for our front porch a couple of months ago and we thought we’d make a side table and footrest to go with it. I made rocking chair footrests for the in-laws last Christmas, so this was a chance to improve upon my design. This was my concept for the side table:
It’s nothing special; I just want a place to set my drink when I sit down and a place to hang a citronella lantern to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
USA Today ran an article about an emerging trend they call Economic Survivalism:
When the economy started to squeeze the Wojtowicz family, they gave up vacation cruises, restaurant meals, new clothes and high-tech toys to become 21st-century homesteaders.
Now Patrick Wojtowicz, 36, his wife Melissa, 37, and daughter Gabrielle, 15, raise pigs and chickens for food on 40 acres near Alma, Mich. They’re planning a garden and installing a wood furnace. They disconnected the satellite TV and radio, ditched their dishwasher and a big truck and started buying clothes at resale shops.
“As long as we can keep decreasing our bills, we can keep making less money,” Patrick says. “We’re not saying this is right for everybody, but it’s right for us.”
The piece points to growing interest in Stockpiling, Gardening, Canning, Sewing and Relocating as signs of the emerging trend.
After the wedding, I felt bad because there was nowhere in our cramped DC apartment for my wife to display her gifts. As a matter of fact, it would be over a year before we even took most of them off her parents’ hands. There was one tiny corner in our place where we could put another piece of furniture, if only we could find something small enough to fit in the awkward space. As you might expect, I ended up building it. Here was the design:
Even though this looks like a simple build, I was worried about making some of the 45° cuts on wobbly sawhorses with a circular saw form the 1970′s.
I always wanted to build a grandfather clock. Maybe it’s just not my style, but I’m not a big fan of furniture that drips with ornamentation. I prefer the simplicity of the colonial and mission styles. With that in mind, I put together a clock a few years ago when my sister and her husband bought a new house. It was to be a simple design that incorporated an electric clock, and it was to serve as practice for the day when I build my own clock. To start, I bought this 50-year-old wall clock off of ebay:
It’s an ugly wall clock that’s supposed to look like a pocket watch. But I didn’t care about the casing; I just wanted the face and clockworks.
I’ve always toyed around with building and carpentry, but most of my projects were small in scope or fairly simple in design. The first project that I would consider a real piece of furniture was a computer desk I made a few years ago.
When my wife and I moved in together for the first time, we tried to replace as much cheap college furniture as possible. Since we lived in a tiny, one bedroom, basement apartment, there was nowhere to hide the computer. Nothing looks more ‘dorm room’ than having a computer/printer set-up sitting next to your bed or kitchen table, so I decided to make a unit that would look antique and completely hide all traces of electronics. This was the design:
It was meant to be like a large secretary desk that would hold the monitor in a drop-down position, and the cabinets below would house the tower, printer, and a file cabinet.
I got the idea to build a bar for our little backyard patio in DC from a magazine article where a cheap potting bench was transformed into a serving station. I liked the idea, but thought I could do a little better than a converted work station. This was my design:
What was difficult with this piece wasn’t the building; I threw it together in two days and painted it on the third. The hard part was knowing that it wouldn’t really be finished for years. I tend to get a little obsessive about my projects, and it was hard to accept that I had to quit after 90% of the work was done.
When I bought my house, it had these built-in cabinets in the dining room area. They look good from far away, but a closer inspection revealed how warped and worn they were:
They must have been thirty years old, and it looked like every owner of the house since then made some kind of change to them. My wife and I decided to demo them, but we realized too late that the hardwood floors had lightened considerably since the original built-ins were put in. Since the floor we exposed was darker than the rest of the house, and since there was no way we were going to refinish the floors after moving in, we reluctantly decided to build new ones.
