Category: DIY

My Non-Resolution: Why I Built a Standing Desk

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I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions for the same reason I don’t believe in diets. If you can’t sustain change, making it in the first place is pretty pointless. So I don’t generally make resolutions, though I do sometimes take the impetus to change that a new year provides and I make something happen. This year I made one, easy to keep resolution: to finally get around to changing out the faucet in my downstairs bathroom. But I also decided to make a bigger change in the way I work, a decision that was driven by the media coverage surrounding the dangers of sitting.

I’m not ready to go this far…

Yes, sitting is apparently the “new smoking.”

I work from home which both allows me to be more active, and more lazy than the average employee.Yes, I take my dog for a lengthy walk in the middle of the day — when most office workers are stuffing their faces with lunch under fluorescent lights — but I also don’t have to get up and walk to co-workers’ offices or desks. I do get up a lot to let the dog or cats out (or in), and sometimes I do chores for a quick work-break. Toss in a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, or vacuum the living room. Still, that wasn’t enough to keep my back from being enraged at the end of the day. I bought a yoga Groupon but that membership has ended and I needed a new solution to help me feel better at the end of the workday. Continue reading →

XOJane’s Addiction

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Now that’s an IKEA hack!

I have a new obsession: XOJane.

I just can’t believe some of the things the writers will admit to…but I totally appreciate that they do.

When blogs first started I was amazed by the way people would write in mortifying detail about the littlest details of their lives. They admitted things to the world wide web that I wouldn’t talk about with my friends. Reading XOJane is a little like that, only you have the benefit of getting to read these kinds of confessions from a variety of people (instead of one navel-gazing blogger) and the writing is better.  Continue reading →

A Hutch of a Different Color

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I’ve got furniture scattered around my house that was either donated to the cause (and by “cause” I mean “me”), picked up at  tag sales or from the side of the road. I got lucky when some of my roadside finds didn’t need refinishing. For instance, I somehow managed to find chairs on the curb that matched the table I bought from Craigslist. A couple of chairs and a bedside table I found at a tag sale were just great from the start. But there has been a corner hutch near my stairs that has been taunting me for almost a year now.

It was a nice hutch with a hideous paint job…but it was free. Every time I pass by it on my way up or down the stairs I would curse it’s terrible color.

I’m not sure if you can tell just how ugly it is from the picture. It almost looks like raw wood, but really it’s yellow with red “accents.” I think someone was trying to make it appear distressed, and I suppose they achieved their goal in some ways.

So my cousin and I decided to tackle this project on Sunday. I’d had a bottle of spray paint sitting around for a while. And we made quick work of spraying the hutch with what I thought was a dark blue-gray color. But once it was on, it looked very, very purple… like Grimace.

Continue reading →

Get Crafty: Curtains

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I’ve been struggling to find curtains or blinds for my porch…which isn’t really a porch. It’s kind of like an over-sized mud room. It has a couch in it, and the furnace room and laundry closet are off of it — which makes it the warmest room in the house in the winter. Most of the time, it’s only the cats hanging out back there, but the windows are an odd size because it’s really two windows next to each other. Off-the-rack shades didn’t really work, and I didn’t want curtains that hung all the way to the ground (because they’d just get covered in cat hair). Cafe curtains didn’t really work either, though, because the room gets a lot of sun in the afternoon and in order to keep it from getting too hot, I wanted curtains that blocked most of the light…

I know, I’m picky.

I started thinking about buying fabric but I wasn’t finding anything I really liked. So I decided  to look at sheets. I headed off to Target, thinking I could probably get away with buying one flat sheet. When I didn’t see one that appealed to me, I headed over to the shower curtains aisle and I was overwhelmed with choices!

Shower curtains tend to be a bit funkier and more colorful than the average drape. I found so many I liked (cotton, not plastic) that I barely knew what to do with myself. A few weren’t in stock, so that narrowed down my choices. (Next time I’m in the market for new curtains  you know where I’m going…) For $19.99 I bought one shower curtain that I was able to turn into two sets of curtains.

A few quick cuts, and a couple of sewn hems later, I had exactly what I’d been looking for.

(Note: If you’re a perfectionist, don’t buy this particular curtain. When I got it home I realized it faded from light to dark. So the two sets of curtains are slightly different colors. I just put the darker pair in the brighter window.)

Signs of Progress: A Garden Update

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The handsome fellow pictured here is Jerry, my cat. He’s prowling through the lemon grass, blueberries, and hollyhocks while I do some basic garden maintenance. Jerry is probably just as curious as I am about who has been nibbling the flowers off of my squash.

I hadn’t planned on doing a garden update so soon. I figured it would be a monthly thing, but then we had a lot of sun followed by a lot of rain and more sun. Those things led to major transformations. I’ve started to get some ripe cherry tomatoes, and I’ve got one tomato plant so huge it will be taller than I am before long. I can’t even imagine the size of the fruit that will come off of it later this summer.

I also got some trellises and tomato cages to try and contain the squash. A trip to my favorite nursery also yielded some sugar baby watermelon starter plants. Of course, there’s not much room in the beds so I put them in the strawberry patch and just outside the raised beds. I also took a couple of seeds from a spaghetti squash that I cooked and planted them. Now I’ve got a couple of sprouting plants. I think I may have to relocate one of them.

It’s really amazing to watch your food come to life. I keep thinking about being a little girl when McDonald’s used to hand out seed packets with Happy Meals (it’s almost too ironic to handle, I know). One year my mother and I planted pumpkins and watermelons. I don’t think the watermelons went anywhere, and the pumpkins got infested by bees. But here I am, probably 25 years later, with a veritable produce section in my backyard. Continue reading →

A Memorial Day Makeover

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Long before I even moved into my house, people started giving me stuff they no longer wanted. For instance, my aunt gave me a couple of end  tables I wasn’t particularly fond of but they did the job. But this week I decided it was time to start tackling some of the furniture rehab projects I’ve been planning.

Tables before being painted, but after a light sanding.

First up on the agenda were the tables. They have some weird nooks and crannies on the legs, so I figured spay painting was the way to go. I turned to a blog post about spray painting furniture on Young House Love for advice. I wasn’t really sure what color I wanted to paint the tables, and there aren’t that many Rustoleum Universal colors to choose from. I knew I wanted to do my patio table one of the hammered finishes, but I didn’t know what I wanted the end tables to look like. I didn’t think glossy would go with my other furniture, but there weren’t many satin options. I wasn’t convinced the metallic options were good for these tables but then I figured, “Hey, it’s only paint!” So my cousin and I picked up some of the “Aged Copper” paint and went to town on the end tables.  Continue reading →