Dining room update.

First things first: to the lady who commented and said that Bradley’s hot…I know, right?? He’s also really nice, really funny and really smart. I’m a big fan of that guy. Especially when he does stuff like this and lets me put it on the internet for everyone to see:

Heh heh. What a guy.

Things are starting to cool down in our neck of the woods. We built our first fire of the season recently:

This year, we’re determined to use our wood-burning stove for heat 90% of the time. We had our oil boiler topped off last winter, but we hate using oil for heat. A few weekends ago, we had two cords of wood delivered and we spent two full days stacking wood. I didn’t take any photos of that because I had the flu and really just wanted to curl up and nap all day.

We know the living room is going to be insanely cold this winter — no insulation, remember? — and it’s the room we spend most of our time in. We won’t get around to insulating it this year, which means we’ll freeze our fannies off if we hang out in there too long.

Now that the dining room is fully insulated, complete with new door and new windows, it makes sense to move the couch and TV in there for the winter. For those of you keeping track at home, this is our third living-room-to-dining-room migration in 18 months. Sigh. Someday, the madness will end. But not today, peeps. Not. Today.

Before we move in, we want to paint the floors and put up trim to finish up the room. But before we can do that, we have to address some issues with our dining room floors.

The floors are old and weathered, but we love the way they look. What we don’t love is how much they bounce, creak and groan when you walk around. Bradley’s mom summed it up: “You could never sneak up on anyone in this house.” We’re pretty used to creaking wood floors from years of living in pre-war apartment buildings. It’s the bouncing that freaks us out.

The bounce in the center of the dining room was so bad that it felt like you were inside a bouncey castle. Or on a trampoline. OK, fine, we’re totally exaggerating, but it was pretty bad. Last winter, Bradley built a wall in the basement so we could store our firewood in one corner:

That wall happens to be right under the dining room, and as soon as it was in place the bouncing stopped. Now we just had to worry about the creaking.

In our case, the creaking was due to wobbly boards. The solution was to nail them down so they stop shifting around.

We used these special nails that have a corkscrew twist through the body. This helps keep nails from popping up and also makes it really hard to pull them out once they’re in place.

We started by snapping some chalk lines along every beam that runs under the flooring:

Finding the beams was easier than it sounds: the butt end of each board has to rest on top of a beam. So we snapped a line down the center of areas where a lot of butt ends met up. Pretty soon, we had a series of parallel lines at fairly regular intervals:

Then we just went in and bang 2 nails per board all the way down the line.

The nail heads are totally visible, but they form nice, straight lines down the length of the room. This is not going to be the right solution for every creaky floor. It would look pretty odd in a new house with shiny new floors. But it works for our old house because the floors are already distressed and rustic. Visible nail heads just adds to the charm.

We nailed down the floor boards in the hallway while we were at it:

And we’ll do the same in the living room once we’ve moved all the furniture out.

There were some crusty, rotten strips of wood in the doorway that connects the living room and dining room, so Bradley removed them and replaced them with new strips of wood:

The process was exactly the same as what we did in the guest bedroom close way back in May 2011. You can read all about that here.

While he took care of that, I put up all the switch plates and outlet covers:

It’s been hard to photograph the color of the walls accurately, but you can really see it now that the outlets are in place.

It’s starting to look finished, but we have a lot of small details to take care of before we’re done. Like installing our new doorbell:

We don’t have any good before pictures of our old doorbell because we ripped that sucker out and stomped on it, Office Space style. You can see it in this picture from earlier in the year:

It was a beige monstrosity straight out of 1975 and they didn’t even bother to center it. We replaced it with this bell that looks like a teeny-weeny version of something that might hang in a middle school classroom:

We centered it, of course. But we’re not 100% happy with it. We might paint it white so it’s not so shiny.

It looks fine during the day, but it’s hanging so close to the track lighting that it blinds us at night. A crisp white will help it blend in a bit and hopefully keep us from burning out our retinas every time we walk through the room.

We painting the floors this weekend, and we can’t wait to share that with you guys. We also have some more updates on what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weekends. Plus we have to share our plans for the laundry room, downstairs bathroom and kitchen. Stay tuned!

DIY Cheat: Concrete Window Sill

Good news, peeps: we’re finishing off the last of our plastering today! We’ll be priming and painting the dining room later this week. We’re actually ahead of schedule right now because we found a shortcut for making our custom concrete window sills. (If you don’t remember those from upstairs, check em out here.)

In order to make concrete sills, you first have to make a mold. Then you mix up the concrete, pour it, thawp out the air bubbles and wait for it to dry. And finally, you clean them up a bit before installing them. We skipped most of those steps and went straight to the clean-and-install part with these babies:

Those are concrete walkway stones for yards and patios. We went to a local nursery and picked up 3 of them for $80. Each one measured 36″ x 24″ and they’re about 2″ thick.

These slabs are much more textured than ours because they were made to mimic stone:

We went for a super smooth, velvety finish in our DIY version. We’re OK with not having matchy-matchy sills throughout the house if it’s something interesting.

Another big difference between our DIY version and these pre-made slabs is the lack of rebar support. The pre-made slabs don’t have rebar in them, so they’re more fragile than then ones we made. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Since there’s no rebar, we can cut these suckers down to whatever size we want. We just have to be really careful while lifting and moving the slabs because they could easily break if we don’t distribute the weight properly.

We measured out our cuts and drew them on the slab using permanent marker. Then we cut it:

To make our cuts, we used a grinder and a circular saw, both loaded with diamond concrete blades. The slabs are 2″ thick, which means there’s no way we’ll be able to penetrate them with one cut. Instead, we first used the grinder to score the cut.

Then we went over the score line using the circular saw:

It helps keep the dust down if you hose the slab with water once in a while:

We ended up giving each cut 2 passes with the circular saw. The first cut was set so the blade cut one inch deep. the second cut was set so the blade cut two inches deep.

After each slab was cut down to size, we were left with 3 window sills that slid right in:

Each one sticks out a bit, just like the windows upstairs:

And we’re really digging the texture:

We sealed up the cracks between the drywall and the sill with painter’s silicone:

And that’s a wrap: we’re done with the window sills! We saved ourselves about 2 full weekends worth of work with our little shortcut. We also have enough left over to do the window sills for our kitchen, so our $80 spend was stretched to two rooms. Not bad, considering how much time it saved us.

We’ll be back later this week with updates on our dining room. We’re currently duking it out over paint colors, but we’ve narrowed it down to a couple of choices. Stay tuned!

I’ve Been Framed 2.0

We’ve already shared how we take existing frames and turn them into mirrors on the cheaps (read up on that here and here). Now we’re going to share how we make our own frames from scratch. We have a lot of stuff we’ve been meaning to frame and hang over the years, but we never got around to it. A few weeks ago, we found this in a thrift store:

Bradley had a nerdgasm. We scooped it up for $10, then chortled and mouth-breathed all the way home. This is the purchase that sent us into a frame-making frenzy. We had some solid oak boards lying around that we thought would be perfect for the job. It looks a little worn and aged — sort of like driftwood. Check out the texture:

We got a bunch of these from Lowe’s for $50, and that was enough to make 5 frames.

The wood was a little rough and had some splinters along the edges, so we started by sanding each board to take the grit off.

While I sanded, Bradley set up the table saw to cut a channel:

Think of a standard picture frame you’d get at IKEA or Target. If you take it apart, you have the frame itself and the glass, plus some sort of backing made out of cardboard or masonite. The glass and backing sits inside what we’re calling the channel.

Bradley ran the end through and then pulled it back out to see if the channel would be deep enough for both the glass and the backing to sit in:

We have more than enough room for everything. So Bradley went ahead and cut the entire length of board. There were some clingers left, so he used a chisel to slice them away:

After that, it was time to cut the board down to size.

We used a miter saw because we need to cut 45-degree angles for the corners.

We simply made a cut with the angle facing in (like the photo above). Then we moved the miter saw blade to 45-degrees on the opposite side and made the next cut. The angles on each cut of wood face in. Once the cuts were made, we could simply piece together the frame:

We have two short cuts and two long cuts. If you want a square frame, just make all the cuts the same. If you want a really long, skinny frame (for a floor-length mirror maybe?), just make the long cuts super long. This is the beauty of DIY frames — the possibilities are endless and the cost is low.

With our frame roughly pieced together, we marked each corner with a pencil:

We made a line to indicate the center of the joint. We didn’t actually measure it out — eyeballing it is good enough for our purposes. This is super important to do because it shows us where exactly we need to make our cuts with the biscuit joiner.

Each joint was also assigned a number 1 through 4, and we marked either end of the center line with that number. We’re doing this so we can take the frame apart and piece it back together later.

The next step is to make cuts with our biscuit joiner. For this we need biscuits:

Not the nummy tea-and-biscuits kinda biscuits, but little football-shaped wood chunks that hold two cuts together. (Sidenote: Bradley’s Dominican coworkers these “cookies,” which is beyond adorable.)

This is how biscuits work:

…except they’re on the inside of the wood. Not following? Lemme break it down for ya:

• Each corner consists of 2 pieces of wood butting up together.
• We make a slot in the butt of each piece of wood.
• We spread wood glue in each slot.
• We put the biscuit in one of the slots. It should fit so that half of the biscuit is sticking out.
• We butt the ends together so the biscuit sits halfway in one butt and halfway in the other butt, thereby joining them. BAM! Biscuit joining!
• Heh heh biscuits in butts.

This is the biscuit joiner Bradley picked up a few weeks ago at the Grizzly warehouse:

It’s a Porter-Cable. He chose it over the others because it has a few more settings than its rival Dewalt. It’s slightly more pricey, but also seems more durable.

See what Bradley’s pointing at there? It says FF. That’s the dial for setting biscuit size. We have to make sure and use FF-sized biscuits or they won’t sit in there properly.

We double-checked. Then triple-checked. And then we made our cuts:

Bradley dangled the piece of wood off the edge of our workspace, with the end he’s cutting facing him. He used his hand to hold it firmly in place. Later, Bradley said, “Don’t do it that way ever.” Why? Because the wood isn’t clamped and could move around. So there you have it: use a clamp, not your hand.

Next step: we line up the red line on the tool with the center mark we drew on the wood.

Once it’s in line, turn the joiner on and firmly push it into the wood. This is what the cut looks like when finished:

We made all our slots first and then moved on to the gluing stage:

We gave each slot a good schmear of wood glue. (Schmear. Always schmear, never smear. That’s the New York in us.) Then we popped the biscuit in the slot

And pressed the ends together. That’s it. We let our newly joined rectangle dry for a few hours. Once dry, we came back to tidy up the joints. For this, we needed wood filler and a putty knife:

A lot of people skip the filler step, but we think it’s worth taking 5 minutes to do. It makes the difference between a frame that looks cheap and a frame that looks fancy. This is what the joint looked like before filling:

We gave it a schmear of wood filler:

Then we pressed it in so it fills the crack:

And finally, we scrape all of the excess off:

Just say no to crack:

We let the filler dry for about 15 minutes and then sanded the joints to make them as smooth as possible:

The next step is crucial. Under no circumstances should one move to the finishing stage without first completing the hammy-posing stage. We take this stuff seriously, people:

Being serious all the time is exhausting.

We really need to lighten up. And learn to use auto-focus properly:

In case you missed it, Bradley’s fingers are doing kind of a weird Dumbledore thing (Level 5 nerd status achieved.) That’s because he stained our frames and didn’t wear gloves:

We felt like experimenting with the finishing, so we tried a few different stains on some leftover wood craps. White made the oak look pink. Black seemed too heavy. Grey looked chalky. So Bradley tried something new.

• First, Bradley stained the entire frame white and immediately wiped it all off. That way the white stayed in the cracks and gaps, but not on the entire surface.
• After that, Bradley lightly stained the surface brown. Emphasis on the lightly. If he used too much stain, it would stain right over the white in the cracks and defeat the whole purpose. So Bradley used a cheesecloth and barely dipped it into the stain. He also took care not to apply pressure at all. Just a light swipe of the cloth gently across the surface.

We really dig the result:

We ordered the glass and it showed up a week ago. Next on our to-do list? Cut mats with our new mat cutter:

Then we’ll be ready to hang up some art. Kinda. We still have to redo the walls in most of the house before we can hang anything. Minor details.

We’re spending our weekend plastering and working on tree trunk side tables, so we’ll be back with more updates soon. Stay tuned for more DIY dorkery!

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We weren’t paid, perk’d, hugged or high-fived for any of the brands we mentioned in this post. We do it just because.

I’ve Been Framed.

ETA: we don’t get many trolls around here, but when we do, we refer them to our comment policy. Please check it out below.

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We realized a few days ago that we completely forgot to post about this frame we found in a thrift store several months ago:

It’s from the same shop where we found our lighting fixture. If we’d had more time to look around, we’re pretty sure we would have walked away with much more. That place was a vintage goldmine. It seems fitting that we walked away with a gold frame. It’s 24″ tall x 35″ wide, and we paid $15 for it.

If you look closely, you can tell that this sucker is plastic. Flip it over and you’ll see a barcode and a sticker:

I didn’t know they made plastic frames in Italy, but that just made it seem so much more fancy. Right away we knew we wanted to paint it a fun color and turn it into a mirror for the half-bath we’ll renovate eventually.

We picked up a can of Valspar’s avocado spray paint in satin finish.

We were really intrigued by the can. We’re loving all the new spraypaint cans that companies are coming out with — they have triggers or super-wide buttons so you don’t get finger fatigue after every coat. Our verdict so far? Rustoleum’s trigger can is our fave because we like the way it’s held and because there isn’t much overspray. Valspar’s is OK. We like the twist cap and the big push button, but there’s so. much. overspray. It seemed like half the can ended up on our grass. We didn’t love it. And we downright hated the color:

As soon as the first coat was down, this is how we felt:

We were thinking the green would be fun and cheerful and cute. Instead, it looked bland and blah and boring. It’s less avocado and more pea soup. It’s just not us. At all.

I hopped in the car, made a beeline for the hardware store and returned with this:

White. Gloss. Made for plastic.

We felt so much better after the first coat of white.

Oh, and while we’re reviewing spraypaint cans here, check out the overspray from our can of Krylon Fusion:

We didn’t love the can itself (finger fatigue happens), but we loved the results. The paint dries fast and looks fab.

The back of the frame sits really close to the wall so you can’t see behind it when it’s hanging, but we gave the flipside one coat of white just in case:

And here’s how it looks now:

While Bradley worked on another frame project, he called up a local glass cutting company. I mean, literally. Here he is on the phone while sanding a frame:

He doesn’t get any I find his multitasking fascinating:

He ordered 4 pieces of glass and 1 mirror, all custom-cut. Once the mirror arrives, we’ll be ready to hang this beauty.

Cost breakdown:
- 24″ x 35″ frame = $15
- White spray paint = $6
- Custom cut mirror = $15

Total cost = $36

We’re big fans of DIY when it comes to frames and mirrors. They’re way overpriced in stores. For price comparison, check out this very basic 30″x25″ framed mirror from Home Depot. It’s similar in dimensions but it’s boh-ring, and it costs a whopping $264. Our total cost of 4 cuts of clear glass and 1 mirror was $37.37. Boom.

If you’re ordering custom glass, we have a few tips to share:

• Go local. Just look under “glass” in a phone book or Google. You can save on shipping and your order is less likely to arrive broken.
• Get clean cuts. That means the glass company scores and cuts the glass, but they don’t polish the edge. Companies charge more for polished edges and bevels — but neither really matters since you won’t actually see the glass edge in the frame.
• Paper your mirror. We talked about this in our last post about DIY mirrors. To keep your mirror protected, paper the flipside after you frame it.

More updates coming up. Stay tuned, peeps!

Green Plants (Black Thumbs)

I love plants. Sometimes I love them too much and I smother them. Sometimes not enough and I starve them. I have a black thumb and will kill pretty much anything that isn’t a basic philodendron (which reminds me, oh crap, I’ve been meaning to water the three I have upstairs!).

A few days ago, we went to Lowe’s and I picked up these beauties on my way out:

Succulents. I have the worst luck with succulents, but I love them so. These tiny plants are supposed to be super easy to take care of (we’ll see about that), and I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t have anything to plant them in, so I picked up a couple of fishbowls for $1 a pop:

We love seeing the whole plant — dirt and all. It’s a nice change from the basic white planters we have all over the house. (We usually go with white planters from IKEA because they’re cheap, durable and neutral enough for any room.)

Right after we planted these puppies, we Googled to make sure we didn’t absolutely need to drill holes in the bottom of the containers. Turns out, we can skip that step if we pour a little activated charcoal at the bottom of the dish, then pile the dirt on top of that. We picked up a small container of charcoal at the pet store — they have it in the fish/aquarium section — and replanted them. So far, they’re doing OK.

Cost breakdown for this easy-peasy plant project:
Small fishbowls = $2 for 2
Plants = $5
Dirt = $6 for a big bag
Charcoal = $9 for a small container (I used maybe 1/10th of the container)

Total cost = $22
Cost per plant = less than $4 each

Not too shabby! In other plant news:

Our day lilies are back! Now here’s a plant even I can’t kill. They come up on their own, I never have to water them and they die because their time is up — not because I forgot to change their soil for 3 years.

 

Baby Name Wall Art: DIY Gift For Expecting Parents

Know what’s nuts? We’re officially at the age where all of our friends are having kids. Scroll down our Facebook pages and it’s basically an endless stream of pregnant women standing sideways holding their bellies. It’s bananas. Apparently we all became adults and didn’t realize it. That fact really hits home this weekend when my brother and his wife have their first baby. And Auntie Leena really, really wanted to make something for the occasion.

Now, we already hit up the stores and did a little shopping for the niece, but nothing felt personal enough. We’ve been DIYing so much over the past year that we didn’t feel right about not physically making something. So this weekend, we threw a little something-something together to hang in the nursery and we like it.

This entire project is inspired by some song lyric art we found on Pinterest. We just put our own twist on it. (You can check out the original at A Beautiful Mess.)

Here’s what we picked up from a craft store for our project:

• 11×14 stretched canvas
• 3″ adhesive letters
• Glossy white spray paint
• Mod Podge
• Sponge applicator
• Patterned tissue paper

We went with a vintage-looking purple and white floral pattern because that’s the nursery’s color palette.

We did a test run to see how everything would look. Basically, you stick some adhesive letters to the paper, then spray paint the entire surface. After the paint dries, you carefully peel off the letters so reveal the pattern underneath. We chose the letters, C, O & P and stuck them to our paper:

We gave it a coat of spray paint:

And peeled up the letters after the paint dried:

The word COP was randomly chosen, but now that we think about it, it might not be a bad idea to whip up some COP art and keep it in the car. You know. In case we need to bribe our way out of a speeding ticket or something. Bat some eyelashes, put a canvas out from the glove box, do a little eyebrow waggling, give a wink. …we’d probably end up in jail.

Anyway, we were satisfied with the way the test run worked, so we went for it. First step: adhere the paper to the canvas using Mod Podge.

We were totally OK with wrinkles and air bubbles, because they’ll add some texture to the canvas. That being said, we didn’t want huge air bubbles, so we used the sponge applicator to smoosh the paper down against the canvas as much as we could. We also followed the instructions on the back of the Mod Podge bottle to a T. We did 3 coats of Mod Podge and gave it 15 minutes to dry in between.

Here’s what it looked like after 3 coats and an hour of dry time:

Air bubbles, creases and wrinkles are ok in our book.

So are brush strokes. We purposely ran the sponge applicator in different directions to get some extra texture in there.

Next step: throw some words out there. We decided to do the baby’s name repeated in a stacked row.

We used a triangle and a ruler to get everything lined up. The N’s were, by far, the toughest letters to lay down straight.

We curled the letters around the top and bottom ends of the canvas:

We ran out of O’s so we used some Q’s for the top and bottom. Shh! It’ll be our little secret.

Then we gave the canvas 4 thin, even coats of glossy white spray paint:

See how the flowers are still visible through the white spray paint? That’s completely by accident. The craft store we went to didn’t carry any of the normal spray paints we get (Valspar, Krylon, etc). They only carried this cheapie brand:

We yelled DO IT! before every coat.

The cheap spray paint turned out to be really horrible. It oversprayed so badly that our grass looks like this now:

And it went on so thin that it took 4 coats (aka the entire can of spray paint) and we could still see the floral pattern. We weren’t sure how we felt about it. Would there be enough contrast? Would the letters even really show up? Only one way to find out:

We waited for the spray paint to dry and then peeled up the letters. There was plenty of contrast. And, since we went with spray paint instead of acrylic, we got crisp, clean lines for the letters. So in the end, we really liked the way the flowers show through the whole canvas.

Here’s how the finished piece looks:

It’s pretty abstract looking until you get up close and see this:

We let the canvas dry overnight. The next day, we flipped it over to paper the back and add a picture hanger:

We gave it another 24 hours to really cure. Then we wrapped it up in tissue paper and put it with all the other baby presents that we didn’t think were personal enough to count. I’ll be delivering them tomorrow. And hopefully my sister-in-law will also be delivering tomorrow. Squee! Fingers crossed for a quick & easy trip to the hospital for her.

This entire project took, maybe, 4 hours from start to finish, minus the drying time. We love how the whole thing can be totally different just by swapping out the paper used for the background and the spray paint used for the foreground. And it doesn’t have to be a name. You could do song lyrics,  a quote you like, a passage from a favorite book, whatever. The possibilities are endless.

We like the look so much that we plan on making one for our house, too. We love the idea of having a HUGE canvas with a really graphic, bold, neon background and a black foreground. We’ll post that when we get around to it. In the meantime, we have a bunch of other projects to share. We’ll be back soon — stay tuned!

The orb gets ORBed.

It’s been raining like crazy in our part of Pennsylvania. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s happened for weeks now. Every Saturday morning, we’d put the cushions on the patio chairs. And right around noon, we’d have to run them back into the garage because it would start raining. Not cute spring drizzly rain either, but torrential downpour rain, complete with thunder and lightening.

We finally got a break over the weekend and decided to do outdoorsy projects as much as we could. Even our furballs got in on the action.

Jabba’s perch is on the deck.

Margot’s more of a sidewalk girl.

We let our cat, Smokey, wander around in the back yard for the first time ever. We’ve tried supervised outdoor visits before, but we were worried that he would try to squeeze under the fence and make a run for it. But, uh, he’s too old to run anywhere now, so he lounged in the sun for a few hours.

While they bummed around, we worked on the lighting fixture we scored at a vintage shop in northern Pennsylvania:

We hung the pendant on a nail in the garage and ogled at it for a while. It’s the first time we’ve seen it hanging and we were smitten.

We dusted the pendant, inside and out, to get rid of the cobwebs and dust. And then we shook up a can of ORB spray paint.

Let’s talk about this paint for sec. We went through a ton of color possibilities when we decided to paint our pendant — turquoise, navy, grellow, glossy white, bronzey-bronze and more. We decided to go with oil-rubbed bronze for two reasons:

1. We didn’t want it to look cheap/plastic.
   There’s a trend right now of painting objects in bold colors like yellows or blues. It’s cute and it’s fun, but it also makes the object look like it’s made out of plastic. We love the way it looks for some stuff (like Young House Love’s adorbs candlestick!), but not for everything. To us, making this metal lighting fixture look like a plastic lighting fixture just feels wrong. It’ll look like some cheap thing we picked up at IKEA. Especially if we went with glossy white — IKEA looooooves glossy white. We’re not saying we’d never paint something yellow or glossy white. We’re just saying it doesn’t feel right for this particular pendant.
2. We don’t want it to look dated next year.
   We don’t really like following home decor trends. Basically, if everyone is doing it, we won’t. Why? Because next year, the trend will be sooooo-last-year and everyone will be in sooooo-over-it mode. We don’t want to update our space every 2 years. We’d rather set it up so it stays stylish for 10 years. That means setting it up in a way that that makes it hard to figure out when exactly it was decorated. And, more often than not, that means ignoring what’s popular. There’s a saying in the advertising biz: when everyone zigs, zag. (This isn’t relevant just for home decor trends. Tribal tattoos, anyone?)

That’s why we decided to go with ORB instead of something more funky. And we think we made the right choice. Here’s how the pendant looked after one thin, coat of ORB spray:

You can see the little specks of bronze that make the paint look metallic instead of just glossy black. And here it is after 3 thin, even coats of ORB:

The trickiest part was painting the inside:

We basically had to shove the can through the hole at the bottom and squeeze a fist through to spray paint inside. Not the most elegant solution, but it worked!

Here’s the full pendant in all its ORB glory:

We’re still totally smitten with this lighting fixture. It’s a perfect fit for the modern-meets-vintage look we’re going for.

The next step is to get it in working condition again. Currently, the pendant has old wiring:

We’re going to yank it all out and replace it with new wiring. We’re dying to wrap up this project, so we’re visiting a specialty lamp store this weekend to find something that works. Stay tuned for updates!

Skeletor Decor

There’s really no delicate way for us to segue into this project so we’re going to throw it out there:

We found a deer skull and painted it. And we like it. A lot.

Here’s the thing: we know this post is going to turn some readers off. Frankly, we don’t care. Our house is a reflection of us. This is not a cookie-cutter, buy-this-at-Target kinda house, and we like it that way. So if the sight of naked skulls grosses you out — come back tomorrow and check out our freshly-painted vintage pendant light.

The rest of you, feast your eyes on this:

We have kind of a thing for skulls. We also have kind of a thing for nature. We love to camp and kayak and fish and hike. That’s how we stumbled across our friend Yorick. A couple of months ago, we went on a hike and found a full deer skeleton. Actually, we found two full deer skeletons, but one of them wasn’t, um, clean yet. The other was completely stripped clean and when we picked up the skull, we realized it was in perfect condition.

The deer died of natural conditions, and had obviously been lying out for a long time. We picked up the skull and took it home with us. We also grabbed one spinal vertebra because it looked cool.

Both the spine and the vertebra were completely picked clean. There was only one problem we could see:

The areas that were partially buried in dirt had become stained brown.

We could have soaked the bones in bleach to whiten them. Instead, we decided to bronze our skull.

Oil rubbed bronze, that is. We shook up a can we had lying around and got to work.

Here’s how Yorick looked before:

You can really see the staining in that picture. Here’s how the skull looked after one coat of ORB:

Right away, we could make out details in the skull that weren’t as obvious when it was a plain old white skull. Like these holes above the eyes:

Or the interlocking seam down the center of the skull that formed when the skull fused together.

We did 3 thin coats, spaced an hour apart and here’s what it looked like after it dried:

We think it doesn’t really look like an organic object anymore. Instead, it looks like it’s cast out of solid metal.

It’s like it would be heavy if you picked it up. We totally expect people to pick this thing up, by the way. Which is why we made sure the bottom was perfectly painted as well:

We loved the ORB skull so much, we decided to paint the vertebra to match:

Right now, the deer skull and vertebra are living on a bookshelf in the living room:

This is only temporary housing. We’re planning on building more bookshelves and we’d love to have one in a crisp white to set the bronze skull in. Wherever they end up, we’re pretty smitten with the way they turned out.

Now the only question that remains is what we’re going to do with all the other deer and cow skulls we have in a box in the garage? Oh, did we forget to mention that? We’ve found a ton of skulls over the years — most of them are from Bradley’s aunt & uncle’s ranch in Texas. They’re just sitting around waiting for us to do something with them. We’re not sure if they’ll all end up as skeletor decor inside the house, but we’re pretty geeked about experimenting with different spray paints to get different looks. So far, we’ve agreed on glossy white, bright yellow and bold blue. We’ll keep you posted on how those turn out when we get around to it.

 

Stuff we learned from this project:

 

• We can’t please everyone. We admit it: we had a little anxiety about this post. We like our readers and we don’t want to piss ‘em off. But at the same time, we have a vision for our house and it’s not based on popular opinion. This is who we are peeps. If you don’t like it, there are other blogs.
  
• We’re not the only weirdos out there. Check out all of these deer skulls for sale on Etsy. And, if you’re ever in NYC, make sure you stop by The Evolution Store in SoHo. It’s like a natural history museum you can shop at. We’re like two kids in a candy store there.

DIY on a Dime: $8 Countertop Compost Pail

For everyone who has emailed and Facebook’d to ask for the plans for our tumbler, we didn’t give specific measurements because they’ll be different depending on the size of the bin. Ours is not a standard 55-gallon drum, so our cuts wouldn’t work for it. We also did a lot of things that aren’t really necessary (the removable bin, the routing, the T-brackets, etc). 

If you want to make an awesome-but-not-exactly-like-ours compost tumbler, check out the Boys’ Life plan. Those Boy Scouts know what’s what. Theirs was the base plan for our tumbler, but we figured out our sizes based on our bin and we added features on as we went along. We’ll probably post the exact cuts of our tumbler if there’s a demand for them, but there are so many floating on the interwebs that it seems really unnecessary. Ya know?

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Hey peeps! We’re off to a pretty productive Memorial Day. Bradley’s cleaning the garage and bringing in some new wood we scored. We’ve already picked 2 pieces from the pile to turn into bedside tables for the guest bedroom. So stoked — not that it’s not fun keeping all our stuff of the floor and under the bed, but the room will feel more finished. While Bradley did that, I loaded the composter and ceremoniously gave it the first tumble. I did it with coffee in one hand and I actually said “Wheeeee!” as it spun. I may also have lifted my coffee mug in a toast-slash-salute. Good times.

Now that our compost tumbler (aka R2D2) is in the back yard, we decided to tackle a quickie project to go along with it. We’ve been eying compost crocks and pails that are designed to sit on kitchen counters. Basically, it’s a mini garbage can that sits on the kitchen counter. We fill it up with compostable food scraps, and when it’s full, we take it out to the tumbler. That way we’re not making 3 trips a day. We mentioned in our last post that we want composting to not feel like a chore. The pail would be a huge help in that.

We found some containers we liked. This one on Amazon is adorbs, but not worth $34 to us. This EcoCrock is cute, but not $36 worth of cute. Here’s one that isn’t even cute, but it costs 30 beans.

The more we searched, the more disappointed we were. It’s just a container with a lid and carbon filter inside to keep things from getting stinky. It shouldn’t cost $30 or $40. We decided to stop looking and make our own. And we’re using the word “make” very loosely here. This is a project that a toddler could do in 2 minutes. Seriously. Also, we picked up our materials at a grocery store so we didn’t have to go far.

Here’s what we purchased:

Look familiar? It’s the spitting image of the $30 compost pail we found on Amazon. We’re pretty sure it’s the exact same container. Only ours is a galvanized ice bucket that we found in the seasonal / BBQ aisle of our grocery store. It was $7.50.

Ours came with a little scoop, which we might use to scoop up veggie scraps or whatever into the container. We also picked up a cat litter box air filter from the pet aisle:

Most of the fancy schmancy compost pails (like this $45 beauty) boast about their charcoal filter that helps control odors. This is the same thing.

It lasts just as long (3 months) and it can be found at any pet store and most grocery stores. And it’s hella cheap because it’s not a specialty product. We paid $1.20 for one big filter.

We also needed masking tape and a pair of scissors, which we already had at home.

We removed the filter from the package and cut it in half:

We made 2 rings of masking tape and stuck them to one half of the filter. We sealed up the other half back in its baggie:

We stuck the taped side of the filter to the inside of the lid, pressing firmly to make sure it adhered well:

And, uh, that’s it, folks. We’re done. We popped the lid back on, tossed that sucker on a kitchen counter and started filling it up with food scraps and other compostable stuff.

Our filter is good for 3 months, and then we’ll swap it out with the other half that we sealed up in its baggie. We’re covered for 6 months before this thing will need any maintenance. The container is dishwasher safe in case so it’s easy to clean. It holds about a gallon of scraps, so we won’t have to go to the tumbler every day.

Here’s the materials list and cost breakdown of our quick-and-cheap compost pail:

• Galvanized bucket = $7.50
• Half a cat litter box charcoal filter = 60 cents
• Scissors = already owned, so $0
• Masking tape = already owned, so $0

Total cost = $8.10

We’d been stashing all of our compostable food scraps in a tupperware container in the fridge for 2 days before we made the countertop container. Including that stuff, it took 3 days to fill up the new container. We’re thinking we’ll be outside flipping the tumbler 2 or 3 times a week. Perfect!

We’ll keep you posted on how our new container works out for us. And we’ll be back soon with more updates from the home front. See y’all soon!

I’ll Tumble For Ya (DIY Compost Tumbler)

That was the official soundtrack to our Saturday because we spent it making a compost tumbler. (A sure sign of my internet nerdiness: I keep typing tumblr instead of tumbler. Boink.) We’ve been thinking about composting for a long time and decided to take the plunge.

A few weeks ago, we started researching different composting methods to figure out which would work best for our needs. Here’s our criteria:

• It has to be outside.
  We briefly considered worm composting, but decided against it because we couldn’t leave it outside in extreme heat or cold. We also read that composting can attract fruit flies and gnats. That’s fine with us — it’s part of the natural process — but we’d rather not have it happening in our basement.
• It has to be low-maintenance. 
  We’re busy people and our daily to-do list doesn’t need any additions. Turning compost with a shovel sounds like a chore, so we scratched bins off of our list.
• It has to be dog-proof.
  One of our dogs is a prissy princess and the other one is a total dog. Margot loves to eat garbage and roll around in smelly stuff. The pile and pit methods are out.
• It has to be low-profile.
  We have big plans for our yard, and they don’t include an eyesore of a compost container sitting in a corner. We want something small and low-key so we can hide it behind planter boxes or bushes.

Based on our needs, we decided to go with a tumbler. It’s kept outside, keeps vermin and dogs out, and only needs to be flipped once or twice a week. Plus it’s small enough that we’ll be able to hide it when we start gussying up the yard.

When we Googled, we found 2 basic kinds of tumblers. One is what we’ve been calling an R2D2 style tumbler (again with the nerdiness) and the other is a pig-roast style rotator. We went with the R2D2 tumbler because it seems easier to flip.

Here’s the plan we came up with:

It’s nothing unique. Plenty of websites have the same basic plan for tumblers. Our favorite was this plan from Boys’ Life. We took the principles from their plan and made our own. One big difference: ours is smaller. We also added in a key feature that we wanted: we can easily remove our bin and move it where we need it. That way we don’t have to drag the entire frame everywhere. And we don’t have to dump our compost and carry it where we need it.

One we had a plan, we gathered supplies. There’s a place in Brooklyn that recycles, cleans and sells food-grade bins. Bradley picked up two 40-gallon bins for $20 each:

Why two? Because our friend Jhane came over to make a tumbler for her backyard, too:

Jhane wanted a 101 on using power tools so she can start building things on her own. She made her tumbler while Bradley supervised to make sure she didn’t chop off a finger or anything. She didn’t. And she made her own tumbler with minimal help. Oh, and Jhane also cut most of the wood for our tumbler so she could get as much practice as possible. Awesome, right?

So when we went to Lowe’s to pick up our supplies, we got enough for 2 tumblers and split the cost.

Here’s the materials list for two tumblers:

• Two 40-gallon recycled food-grade bins
• One 12-pack of 6″ Timberlok screws
• One pound box of 1.25″ deck screws
• Four T-shaped brackets
• Twelve 1.5″ lags
• Two 3/4″ galvanized pipes
• Two 3/4″ galvanized pipe caps
• Pressure treated wood
  • One 2x10x8
  • One 2x4x8
  • One 2x6x8

Total cost for two tumblers: $140
Cost for one tumbler: $70

Bradley and Jhane measured and cut the wood for the legs inside the garage:

I went outside to drill air holes in the bins:

We marked the bins using orange chalk so the holes weren’t all over the place.

We’re anal like that.

By the time I finished, the carpentry crew had two sets of legs ready to go. Each leg consists of two pieces:

Flash forward a bit and this is what they’ll look like:

Here’s how we put them together. Each leg is held together using a T-shaped bracket, deck screws and lags:

Plus two 6″ long screws per leg:

These puppies were kind of a splurge. The 12-pack ran us a little over $12. But they’re worth every cent. The legs are crazy sturdy.

We put the two pieces of wood together and lined them up so they’re centered. Then we laid a T bracket on top and traced the outline:

Then we used a router to carve out the shape of the T bracket:

That way it can sit in there nice and flush with the wood:

That whole routing thing, by the way, is a totally skippable step. It doesn’t really matter if the bracket is flush with the wood. I wasn’t kidding when I said we were anal. Plus it gave Jhane a chance to learn how to use a router.

We added a deck screws and lags through the T bracket:

The legs were still a little wobbly at this point, so we added a 6″ screw to each side:

And finally, we had sturdy legs:

Here’s Bradley doing his best R2D2 impersonation, beeps and all:

Next up, we drilled a big hole through each leg for the pipe to go through. We used a 1.25″ spade drill bit for that.

Margot watched him intently:

Not only does she love to eat and roll in garbage, she loves to eat and roll in wood shavings. We had to keep shooing her out so she wouldn’t eat treated lumber shavings. Weirdo!

After the hole was drilled, we used a circular saw to make two cuts from the top of the leg to the hole:

This is how it looked when we finished:

It’s basically like a big U. The pipe will sit in the rounded part at the bottom. We didn’t like how clunky it looked so we decided to shave off two triangles at the top. Again, anal, and totally optional.

Here’s how the legs looked with a 23″ piece of wood between them and the pipe in place:

The wood piece in between the legs is what holds the two sides together, so we wanted it to be really sturdy. We used two 6″ screws to hold them in place:

We ended up having to use 6″ lags for Jhane’s tumbler because we ran out of 6″ screws, but they were even more heavy duty. The legs on her tumblers will never wobble.

Bradley tested the weight limits on our tumbler frame:

It held just find with a 152-pound man swinging on it, so we should be fine. Next, we drilled holes in the bin to thread the pipe through:

We used the spade bit again:

The placement of the hole will depend on the height of the container. Our containers are 32″ tall so we placed our hole at the halfway point of 16″. We drilled one hole on each side:

Then we put the pipe through:

And we put the container on the stand:

We put a galvanized pipe cap on each end of the pipe. Then we put the lid back on the container. Ta-da! It’s a tumbler. We had to test it’s spinning ability:

We shouted “WHEEL. OF. FORTUUUUUNE!” every time we gave it a whirl. And we did Boy George proud with our rendition of “I’ll tumble for ya!” I don’t think the neighbors appreciated it, but we were entertained.

Here’s how the tumbler looks when it’s hanging out on it’s stand, waiting for a spin:

And here’s how it looks when we remove it from its stand and take it to whatever part of the yard needs a little dirt:

Jhane’s tumbler looks exactly the same except her bin doesn’t have a little white spot in the middle of the lid. Her family plans on painting theirs to look like R2D2. Beep boop! Super cute. We’ll snag some pics when it gets a paint job.

The entire project took about 2.5 hours from start to finish. At $70 a pop, it was a bit more than we were planning on spending. We thought each tumbler would end up costing about 50 beans. The reason for the extra cost? We splurged on pressure treated wood instead of just regular lumber.

We could have gotten regular wood and painted it, but it would have involved more work and more maintenance. We didn’t want to have to repaint the stand every year or two. With pressure treated lumber, we can pretty much leave it alone and it’ll last indefinitely.

Coming up tomorrow: we made our own countertop compost pail. Squee! Stay tuned.