Posts Tagged minor

Things I did today

  • Mowed some of the lawn, in advance of tomorrow’s expected thunderstorms.
  • Reorganized the shed, because starting to reorganize the back room immediately led me to the shed for something and I just, well, my talents were more needed there.
  • Found an excellent use for part of an old broomstick. (Pic soon)
    • Remembered how I need to take a few more pictures to finish off months-old posts sitting in the drafts folder.
  • Swapped the glass window for the screen window in the front storm door.
  • Discovered a loose piece of trim on screen door, took it down to tack down said trim.
  • Returned hammer and tacks to back room.
  • Discovered more loose trim, took screen window down again.
  • Checked to make sure there was nothing else loose on the screen window. Returned hammer and tacks to back room. Muttered about how the back room needs reorganizing.
  • Put screen window in front storm door.

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Voila. A sideboard. Sorta.

Doesn’t this look nice?

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It does! That’s why it’s a shame it would have fallen apart and/or collapsed if you looked at it wrong. I say ‘would have’ (and fallen, and collapsed, and looked) because I turned these miscellaneous items into a fully functioning side table with less than $2 in parts.

The legs were a handy find at a restaurant liquidation – they’re a stand for a server’s tray, and probably cost me less than 50 cents. The top is a salvaged piece of good quality veneered particle board from a broken Ikea dresser I disassembled a while back. The dimensions worked and the pieces looked nice together. Keeping them together was the trick.

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And that illusion was solved by two $0.48 pipe straps from the local hardware store and a handful of screws from the back room:

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‘Quick’ custom drawers

The box shelves I built, so as to curb my daily wanderings into the living room for the purpose of getting dressed, did an excellent job of shelving things. But sometimes things should be drawered instead of shelved.

In my experience (and I once built a prop desk off of a three inch sketch, so I have at least some) drawers are boxes with hardware and/or framing that allows them to slide in and out. The box part should be exceedingly simple – it’s the functionality that requires some planning. Or, in the case of my never-ending collection of salvaged stuff, someone else’s planning that you save.

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A quick transition

Removing the carpet from one room, but not the adjacent hallway, left a bit of a drop between the two:

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I debated various possible home-brewed solutions, then stopped by Home Depot on the way back from something else and perused the floor transitions section. Turns out there’s something for just this sort of situation (it’s intended for tile adjoining carpet).

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Build your own mitre saw bench

It’s quick and easy, and you can do it with things you have lying around the house!

Step one – check if you have a mitre saw lying around the house. Otherwise, this is not the project for you.

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All natural paint stripper

I keep a gallon of vinegar under the kitchen sink pretty much all the time. It’s an extremely useful cleanser, especially in conjunction with baking soda or a dash of salt as a mild abrasive. It’s also a weak acid (duh) and thus useful for loosening or degrading any number of things – like an old, thick coat of paint covering metal clothes hooks.

CIMG8638 Read the rest of this entry »

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Where there is no floor

I recently checked my folder of ‘for the blog’ pictures and found three-year-old shots that were forgotten about in the midst of forgetting about posting. Ridiculous. Unacceptable. Unacceptably ridiculous, I say. This is the first of (hopefully) a series of ‘in progress’ posts, an effort to just write more and thereby reflect the amount of work actually getting done.

We’ll see if this works at all.

Let’s start this off with a side project on a much larger (and also still in progress) project. While pulling up carpet in an upstairs bedroom, I discovered that the 1920s addition on the back of the house wasn’t… quite… complete:

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How to keep yourself sane at night

When you’ve replaced a smoke detector and stuck the old one somewhere with vague intentions of recycling or properly disposing of it or whatever, take that extra moment to remove the battery. This way you will avoid spending your 2am hour going up and down stepladders replacing perfectly fine batteries in all of your other smoke detectors.

The more you know…

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More things that can be built with 2x4s

A ramp for the shed which *should* be capable of supporting the industrial drill press that’s currently in there.

Quick (stackable) sawhorses using these plans, currently minus the plywood caps.

Updates (and pictures) to follow.

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Quick updates

I won’t get in the habit of posting about the house if I don’t get in the habit of posting about the house.

QED.

Recent work, as opposed to rearranging stuff to make room for the NY stuff, includes:

  • painting the porch eaves
  • painting the sides of the house to at least the top of the second story windows
  • various sealing and puttying on eaves and trim
  • installation of some new shelves in the laundry room

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