A blog of a variety of projects
Projects done to improve, decorate, or repair parts of a house.
Last year we had our bathroom professionally remodeled. One part of the bathroom that I wanted to do myself was to build the new vanity from a cute dresser. We had seen DIY sites with how-to tutorials for converting a wood dresser into a water-resistant vanity, so we went to…
Last summer we started a long process to resurface our kitchen cabinets and counters to make them both more functional and more modern-looking. We started with a plan that we wanted to do something about our ugly cabinets. My best guess is that the previous owner had tried to stain…
Last year we replaced our grass in the backyard with a layer of wood chips to cut down on maintenance. This works really, really well. The wood chips don’t need to be mowed or watered. Every couple years we will have to put another half ton or so of wood…
We are in the process of remodeling our kitchen (which will be its own story when it is done). One of the huge improvements was replacing our kitchen sink with a deep aluminum apron sink. It is very similar to a farmhouse sink, except for 2 things. First: it weighs significantly…
At this point, I’ve been fully converted to an Ikea engineering fanboy, (he said, sitting in an Ikea chair under an Ikea lamp). I don’t much like the experience of shopping at Ikea and prefer to buy used furniture supporting local thrift stores, but the Ikea design-for-manufacturing engineering is damn…
While we’re sheltering in place, I took some time to clean up the garage by hanging the things that wasted the most space: the bikes and the skis. The bike rack hangers are not innovative, I just purchased them from Amazon. The plates of the bike hooks just mount straight…
This is a very simple and quick project. The whole thing took about 10 minutes, given that I already had the lamp, carved pumpkin, and cloak. I keep some of these Ikea floor lamps around because they are simple and useful. I usually buy extras when we go to Ikea…
After our dogs dug up all the grass in our backyard and we had two gigantic trees removed, we decided to build a seating area for a fire pit. The yard is covered in wood chips for the dogs, so it needed to be big enough to prevent a stray…
The Neopixel RGB Visualizer project page is up with more detail about the project than is on GitHub. Check it out here. I didn’t publish a post related to this project, since the site went up right at the end of it, so I am publishing this retroactive plug for…
This was the first Halloween that we celebrated in our new house! With that in mind, we made the groundwork for 2 multi-holiday decorations that we will reuse for each holiday. We used picture wire, but any kind of hanger will work to get these hung up on a wall…
