Decor
According to the Craft & Hobby Association, March is National Craft Month. And "crafting" is a great way to DIY some of the finer aspects of your home.
Many different stores such as Joann, Michael's, and Hobby Lobby are hosting free events, classes, and workshops at their stores, and there are a great deal of sales to be had. But you might find yourself wondering, what does this have to do with your home?
Easy. Everything!
Crafting doesn't have to be your grandma's knitting or your kids' Play-Doh creations. It's the best way to tip-toe yourself into DIY land without requiring much skill, costing too much money, or leaving a giant hole in a wall (ideally).
Spotted over at IKEA Hacker, I love Melanie's bench-coffee table contraption. Melanie used an Ikea office bench (in zebra), a Flort remote control pocket and u-shaped tables made from plywood.
Here's how she did it:
For the U-shaped red tables, I went to the hardware store with the measurements of the zebra bench. There, I had sets of plywood cut in the exact right size, bought metal brackets, Spax screws and red acrylic paint - and built those U-shapes at home in an afternoon.
Now those little tables can be removed from or repositioned on the zebra bench - and each table has the exact size for a laptop or an A4 paper plus some room for a cup or a glass.
Sometimes ready-to-assemble furniture is a nightmare. And by sometimes, I mean most of the time. Even for a moderately experienced DIYer like myself, identifying parts, trying to understand diagrams and figuring out where the heck part "g" is can be a total hassle.
After a recent battle with a Target TV stand (which took over four hours for me to assemble), I've decided to share some of my idiot-proof tips that I wish I'd thought of before I got started.
1. Make Space
Don't try and put together a piece right where you plan on putting it. Work on assembling something in an area where you can lay out all the pieces on the ground so that everything is visible. I'd also pick a room that you can walk away from in the inevitable moment when you'll need a breather.
2. Take Inventory
Check to see that every piece of the puzzle is there. Nothing is worse than making progress in the building and realizing you're short on a very important nut or bolt. I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me and I've had to live with a lopsided pieced together item that's waiting for a missing part to arrive.
While perusing my usual rounds of shelter blogs, I came across this post from Apartment Therapy's sister site Re-Nest, giving ideas for 25 DIY projects under $50 and thought I'd pass it along.
It's not often these days that we have an extra $50 to spend (with our son turning one this weekend and another baby on the way, we have to put the kiddos before the house) but I appreciate the idea that not every project to beautify your home has to be labor intensive and wallet-draining.
Many of us covet a new bathroom. We've collected some remodel and design ideas that could provide some inspiration for you to take on the job yourself or at least get you started.
Designing an extraordinary bath (tips from Waterworks founder)
Frame a beveled bathroom mirror to add some character
Choosing a vessel sink
5 bathroom furniture ideas
Living in an older home comes with many things you can see as "charm" or "obstacles" depending on the situation at hand. You have less-than-stellar plumbing and electrical, uneven floors, creepy crawl spaces, dank and dark basements, inefficient windows, doors that don't hang straight, mismatched millwork, etc. One of those situations in my home is our plaster walls.
As our home has aged and settled (and actually been moved from one location about a mile away to where it is now) over its 112 years of life, our walls have been worse for the wear. Cracks are apparent everywhere, and seem to be reproducing and spreading at an alarming rate. Dents become huge dusty messes to repair and camouflage. And in the case of two of our rooms, just began falling off in sheets due to fire and water damage and general rot. So while we've torn down and drywalled in its stead what was necessary, we're not keen on creating that kind of mess any time soon again.
However, our foyer-stairwell-upstairs landing area leaves much to be aesthetically desired. Removing a broken banister and plastic wainscoting (that was GLUED to PLASTER WALLS for added angst) caused us to partially repair with drywall and partially ... just cover it with paint. Unfortunately, the color isn't what I had hoped for, and our first foray into drywalling isn't pretty. (Mental note, if your spouse tries to convince you that spackle and wall mud are the same thing, STOP THEM. It's not, and I have the unsightly wall to show for it.)
One of the hardest parts about nearly any home renovation project is deciding what goes where. Whether you're planning a space from the foundation up, or just trying to think of new ways to arrange your living room, thinking spatially can cause major headaches (as well as backaches from moving all that furniture).
Well, thanks to FloorPlanner these arduous tasks just got a whole lot easier.
Here's a great do-it-yourself room divider idea I spotted over at Remodelista from Australia design studio Alwill.
The divider was made with rope, tied to two wooden dowels, one attached to the ceiling and one attached to the floor. For another twist, try using a thick ribbon or colored twine in place of rope.
My friend Marc (of the demolished kitchen fame) asked me one day if I knew of any "backwoods" methods of removing wallpaper from plaster walls as to prevent damage from being done. I didn't - we just tore down the walls that had wallpaper on them (but regretfully so - the paper was gorgeous and vintage, but the plaster behind was as rotten as a jack o'lantern at Thanksgiving).
However, as someone with a house still 80% full of plaster walls and dreams of wallpapering, I figured it was something worth researching.
So after putting my sociology degree to good fact-finding use, I present you with the Internet's best resources on removing wallpaper from plaster walls:
Hands down, this eHow article is the most direct with information, making it a winner in my book. It describes the process in painstaking step-by-step detail, and it gets bonus points for first using vinegar - a non-toxic, enviro-friendly and cheap solution to a messy problem.
There's a local movement in the border city of Carlisle, UK (10 miles South of Scotland) to keep a train station decorated as it was for a Homebase commercial that included vibrant flooring, modern lighting and contemporary furniture.
The train station is considered "listed" and therefore must maintain its historical facade but the residents are definitely enjoying a bit of colour and comfort in their normally rote commutes.
There's now a Facebook group with more than 6,000 members that hopes it has convinced Virgin trains to keep some of the decor and it looks like they've gained a bit of notoriety in their town and Virgin has stated they will try to incorporate some of the changes leftover from the station makeover.
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