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.

Dressing Up Our Patio

It’s officially spring in our back yard.

To celebrate, we invited over our neighbor-friends to make S’mores over the first fire in our firepit. The only problem? We had nothing for them to sit on. Four hours before we were expecting 2 adults and 2 kids to join us for dinner, our patio still looked like this:

The good news is that we work really well under pressure. We drove to Target to scope out what they had going on. We ran to Lowe’s to do a little price comparison, and then back to Target where we walked out with a flatbed full of stuff. We drove back home and assembled everything. And then we died of exhaustion:

OK, not really. We seize any opportunity to ham up a photo.

We started by picking out the loveseat. They had matching side tables and other stuff, but we don’t like things to be too matchy-matchy. Instead, we found coordinated side tables that we liked. After that, we picked out the pillow:

We couldn’t pass on this cute little tealight lantern in the same blue:

To add a punch of color, we went with an umbrella in a bold orange:

We didn’t go into the store with a color scheme in mind, but we walked out with some pretty well-coordinated purchases. This is the beauty of Target. It’s really easy to throw a scheme together. We just picked a main piece that we liked in a neutral tone. Then we found an accessory we liked in a color that coordinated well with that neutral. After that, we just picked a couple more pieces in colors that either matched or contrasted with the first accessory. Easy peasy!

On the other side of the fire, we have the 2 Ariondack chairs that we finished last summer. (We snagged them at Home Depot on sale, then assembled, stained and sealed them ourselves.)

In the middle is a little glass table that we picked up at our local hardware store. And the beverage bucket on top of that was something we found at Lowe’s last summer, but didn’t have a reason to use until now. (It was eventually filled with ice, sodas and brewskies.)

We also picked up a little something-something for our porch.

To celebrate spring, we’re going to eat as many meals outside as we can. So we picked up these two wicker chairs and a table. The chairs barstool height, so every time we sit on them, it feels like we should have a margarita in front of us.

We picked up another tealight holder for the table. And we also added this cute porcelain milk carton vase from CB2. Our friends Zac and Cathy had these vases as centerpieces at their wedding in Florida. We flew back with several of these in our suitcases all the way back to New York. They’re awesome! The flowers, of course, courtesy of thee huge lilac bush in our yard. We’re currently putting them all over our house and loving the natural air freshener.

Soooo…if we were on the reader end of this post, we’d be wondering how much all of this stuff cost. Here’s a tally of (and some links to) everything we purchased:

• Loveseat
• Pillow
• 2 side tables
• Lantern
• Umbrella
• Umbrella base
• Outdoor dining table
• 2 wicker chairs
• Tealight holder
• Kid-friendly plastic dinnerware: 6 plates, 6 bowls, 6 glasses
• Galvanized white round silverware caddy

The grand total: $625

Not bad for the amount of stuff we got! Everything except for the plastic dinnerware and the galvanized caddy were on sale, so we saved about $150 off of the regular price. And we went from having just a couple of Ariondacks to having a full set of patio furniture and a new outdoor dining setup.

What’s next for our patio? We’re considering replacing the two Ariondacks with a couple of matching chaise lounges. We just ordered all of the supplies we need to insulate and drywall the dining room, and we’re about to be suuuuper busy with that. We might need a place to go pass out at the end of each work day! The Ariondacks are really comfortable, so we’re not sure if we’ll splurge on the chaise lounges this year. We’ll keep you posted.

In other news, we’re still stripping the stubborn lacquer and stain from those 1950s chairs we recently scored. Stay tuned for some more updates from the home front coming soon!

Burning Ring of Fire

We weren’t planning on renovating the outside of our house until we finished up the inside, but last weekend’s amazing weather had us jonesing for an outdoor project. So we got a head start on the yard reno and made a fire pit.

Neither of us has ever done anything like this before. We didn’t really plan out this project. It was just something we decided to do when we woke up on Saturday. “What a nice day. …let’s make a fire pit!” Yeah. We’re nuts.

We have big plans for our back yard. What we currently have is a rectangle of patchy grass, gravel, cement and perennials randomly bordering the fence. What we want is a functional space — a vegetable garden, a compost pile, a stone patio for BBQs, some chaise lounges. So we’re basically going to split the yard in half. Everything in the picture above is going to be scrapped and replaced.

We started by removing some big stones from the end of the yard:

This may have been a decent-looking stone patio at one time, but it’s pretty haggard now. The stones are in good shape, though, so we’re going to reuse them.

Next up, we had to set our fire ring.

That’s a heavy-duty ring of steel that we picked up from a local metal fabricator. It cost $54. I made coffee while Bradley centered the ring between the fence and the cement walkway. Then he started digging:

Bradley used a shovel, a level, and a rubber mallet to set the ring into the hole.

Ta-da! We have a fire pit! We went to Home Depot and picked up some treated lumber, a rake and a tamper.

Then we stopped by a local nursery and ordered a pallet of stone and some gravel. They delivered it the next day. All of our materials cost about $300.

We spent Saturday framing the stone patio.

On Sunday morning, the nursery delivered the stone and gravel. We also ordered some weedkiller fabric so nothing will grow in our stone patio.

We also picked up some hardware to bolt the lumber together:

After that, we started carting in the gravel:

One of us brought in the gravel and the other tamped it down.

After that, we brought in the stones.

We started with the big stones we pulled from the yard. Then we added in the smaller, new stones to make a grid.

We basically had to play Tetris with the stones.

We had to use a grinder to cut a few pieces.

Here’s how it looks now:

It’s obviously not finished. We still have to level each stone and fill in the gaps with gravel. It’s going to take another weekend to wrap up before we can start making s’mores.

We’re already talking about building an L-shaped bench, a concrete coffee table and some huge planter boxes for the patio. We’re not sure if the rest of this side will be stone or something more cost-efficient, but we’ll figure that out later. For now, we’re just glad to have something useable in our yard.

We’ll wrap up this project over the weekend if the weather cooperates. Stay tuned for that, plus some updates on other small projects we’ve been working on. Happy spring, everyone!

Dumpster Day

Remember a couple of months ago when we cleaned out our garage and it looked like this?

Well, here’s how it looked last weekend:

Somehow our gabage came back tenfold. And we accumulated a bunch of things that we’ve never owned before — a snow shovel, a wheelbarrow, a couple of Ariondack chairs that we need to store until spring.

That towering white thing in the middle? That’s our dishwasher stacked on top of our fugly old oven.

We like to utilize vertical storage space. There’s also a lawn mower, a weed whacker, another shovel — according to Bradley, one can never have too many shovels.

There’s an overabundance of recyclables because our town only collects recycling once a month. Annnnd they refuse to collect recycling if they think something isn’t sorted correctly. For the last 3 months, we’ve had a standoff with the recycling people because they think we don’t know the difference between glass beer bottles and aluminum cans. Currently the bane of our existence:

Aluminum bottles. Shaped like glass bottles. What is this world coming to?

They confuse the hell out of our recycling collection people. Because of those bottles, they’ve refused to pick up our recycling 3 months in a row. And we keep schlepping it back to the garage in hopes that they’ll figure it out. So far, no luck.

One the other side of the garage:

Piles of wood from past demolitions, an old ceiling fan, a moped and random cement supplies.

Our garage isn’t the only place we’ve been stashing garbage. We put a pile of wood from our dining room demolition under the hideous trellis in the back yard. Here’s Bradley digging them out from under a giant pile of leaves:

There is so much we hate about that trellis. It’s poorly built. It’s ugly. Its only purpose is to support the grape vine. That’s what all of those spidery branches are — they’re part of the grape vine that I was so geeked about when we first moved into the house. Fresh grapes! Stuffed grape leaves!

Turns out our grape vine doesn’t actually put out any grapes. And it’s the location of a ginormous ant hill. Most of the big branches are rotten and full of ants inside. Plus, it’s waaaaay too high-maintenance for us. Are you seeing that pile of leaves? Sorry neighbors. We’re way too busy sprucing up the inside of the house to rake leaves. The grape vine and its accompanying trellis had to go.

While Bradley sawed, I raked.

Jabba supervised:

She went to the vet earlier that day for her annual shots, and she had a horrible allergic reaction to them. Poor little peanut. We had to rush her back to the vet to get a shot of Benadryl. She spent the rest of the day wrapped up like a burrito where we could keep an eye on her.

Aside from a couple of trips to the vet, we spent the entire day loading our dumpster. We booked it for 2 weeks, but it took us one day to fill it up:

Here’s how the garage looks now:

Still a little messy, but at least it’s a contained mess. Most of which, by the way, is the recycling that just won’t go away.

The back of the house looks way less scary with the trellis gone:

We don’t miss the grape vine either:

We’re chomping at the bit to start renovating this part of the house. Right now it makes our house feel like a shanty. It’s an ugly tumor on the otherwise quaint old brick.

The window on the left is to the half-bath. The windows & door on the right are to the laundry room. We’re not really sure what’s going on with the mix-and-match siding:

And the contrasting stairs:

Either way, we won’t get too used to it. We plan on gut renovating those two rooms inside and out. New siding, new windows, and all. We’re counting down days until our self-imposed spending freeze is up. Then we’ll order supplies and get down to business.

We’ve been super busy at our casa — so busy that we’re really, really behind on posts. We’ll be back every day this week with updates. Promise. Stay tuned!

An update on those Ariondacks

Happy Monday, everyone! I’m sitting here a few hours before work starts, sipping on coffee and listening to the sounds of our plasterer sanding our walls smooth. I took some pictures of her first and second coats, and they’re better than our third coats. No joke. We can hang drywall with the best of ‘em, but put a plaster knife in our hands and we’re useless. I’ll share those pictures soon!

While our plaster-lady has been busy upstairs, we’ve been busy on the porch with our $18 Ariondack chairs. This is what they looked like when we assembled them:

Pasty! These chairs are pine, and they’re blindingly light in front of the red brick. They sit there screaming “HEY, LOOK AT ME, I’M AN UNFINISHED CHAIR!” It also didn’t help that it’s been raining buckets in our part of Pennsylvania. Unfinished wood + moisture = bad news. In between rainstorms, I gathered up some supplies and got to work.

L to R: gloves, stain, mask, cheesecloth.

Bradley got the stain from his usual paint supplier in Brooklyn. They screwed up an order he made, so he ended up with a glossy finish when he requested a matte finish. It was a disaster. He had to sand everything down and start from scratch. Ugh. When he went back to exchange the varnish, they gave him this can of extra dark walnut stain on the house. It normally runs about $20 a quart.

At first glance, it looks super dark:

I was pretty unsure about how it would turn out because this wasn’t the deep, chocolatey-brown I had imagined. I tried a little on a hidden spot just to test it out:

Annnnd it looked black. But before I could say anything, Bradley dipped his cheesecloth rag in the stain and smeared it all over the leg:

ACK! Too late to turn back now. Bradley went inside to do some electrical work and I covered every exposed area of pine with the way-darker-than-I-had-hoped-for stain. This was my first time staining something since 7th grade wood shop, but it was pretty easy.

Here’s what worked for me:

• Don’t use too much stain. I only dipped the tip of my cheesecloth into the stain — never the whole rag. A little goes a long way.
• Tear up a bunch of rags and swap them out frequently. When my rags got too wet, they were harder to work with. So I kept switching between 3 different rags, letting them dry out a little in between uses.
• It also helps to have dry rags to wipe up excess stain. You don’t want the stain to go on too thick. You want the wood to soak up the stain. So I had a pile of rags on standby and after covering a section of the chair with stain, I gave it a good wipedown with a dry rag to get all the extra off.
• If you’re using disposable gloves, make sure you have several pairs and change them out frequently. Why? Because this happens:

Bradley came out to check on me and he mentioned in passing that I should probably switch gloves. And that’s when I noticed that I’d rubbed right through the glove and use staining with my fingers. Oops. He said it happens to him all the time — he just forgot to remind me.

And that brings me to my last tip:

• If you get stain on your fingers, try dish soap first. I had to be at work in NYC the next day, so I freaked out when I saw my stained hand. I scrubbed it with orange pumice soap over and over again, and nothing happened. Well, they ended up super soft and smooth, but still stained black. I then tried wiping them clean with acetone, which cleaned off my nails but left my skin still blackened. And then I used Dawn dish soap — surprisingly, it got most of the stain off in one wash. Lesson learned!

Just like Bradley said, the stain dried much lighter than it looked when I initially put it on. Here’s how the stained and raw chair look in a little side-by-side comparison:

We gave the chair a 24-hour break to dry off and went back to check on it the next morning.

The color was definitely a brown (phew!), and it had almost a greyish tint to it. We loved how the wood grain showed through. That’s the reason we went with a stain instead of a paint — we wanted the chairs to have some dimension. Satisfied with the turnout, I went ahead and stained the second chair:

It dried for 24 hours, too, and then it was time to sand and varnish both:

The one on the left is unsanded, and the one on the right is sanded. The brown lightened up a little, but we were OK with that.

We got the varnish from our local Ace Hardware for just under $6. I started with the bottom first:

The wood went from a dull grey-brown to a very deep, rich chocolate brown. Exactly what we were hoping for. One thing we weren’t expecting is the way the wood grain turned out gold instead of light brown. It really popped against the brown, and we were so geeked about how it looked.

Here’s how it looked after the first coat dried:

After it cured overnight, we lightly scuffed it with 330-grit sandpaper:

Then I gave it a second coat of varnish using a soft paintbrush. Here’s how it looked half-done:

The second coat of varnish left the chairs suuuuper glossy:

We’re so geeked about this next part because it seems like forever since we’ve done a before-and-after. Squee!

When this was done, we were happy dancing all over the place. What we really wanted to do is sit down in them, but they needed to cure overnight before we could put them to use.

We think the stain + varnish job gave the $18 chairs a major upgrade. Not only do they look fancier, they feel fancier. In order to put 2 coats of varnish on smoothly, we had to sand the chairs twice: once before the first coat, and once before the second coat. So the chairs now feel silky smooth to the touch. And, even though we initially didn’t love the glossiness of the finished chairs, it quickly grew on us and we love how they look.

How much did this quickie upgrade cost us?

• $36 for the chairs
• $0 for the stain
• $1.50 for the cheesecloth
• $6 for the varnish
• $4 for the paintbrush

Grand total: $47.50, or $23.75 per chair.

Even if we had paid $20 for the can of stain, each chair wouldn’t have cost $33.75. And that’s a generous estimate: we only used 1/2 of the varnish and only about 1/4 of the stain. Throw in that $11 table we found at the local hardware sore and our little porch setup cost us $58.50. Cheapskates rejoice!

Besides our staining and varnishing, we’ve been working like crazy to get the upstairs ready to paint. More on our progress coming up. Stay tuned!

Impulse Buy: $18 Ariondack Chairs

We went to Home Depot to replenish our drywall supplies and ended up walking out with a couple of these:

Ariondack chairs for the porch!

We’ve been on the hunt for some outdoor furniture, but didn’t really find anything we were loving. When we spotted these Ariondack chairs on sale for $20 a pop, we couldn’t resist. They’re unfinished fir, and come flat-packed for easy schlepping. And with a 10% coupon we’d just received in the mail, we ended up paying $18 per chair. Cheapskates rejoice!

The chairs came IKEA style — flat-packed, unassembled, but easy to put together. And the best part was that we don’t even have to use wood filler:

They came pre-puttied. Score! It took about 20 minutes to put ‘em together, and we were pretty pleased with the end result. The only thing we couldn’t agree on was whether to put them side-by-side:

Or facing each other:

I don’t think Jabba’s too crazy about the second set-up:

Well, too bad, pug, that’s how they’re staying!

The only thing missing was a little table to go between the two. Something to set our books, beers and coffee mugs on. And that problem was solved the very next day when we went to the local hardware store — we spotted a small patio table on sale for $11.

It’s cheaply built and not all that great looking, but sometimes practicality trumps style. Especially in those precious moments right after you accidentally knock over and spill a freshly-brewed cuppa coffee all over the porch. We snatched up a table and brought it home:

Never again will a cuppa coffee be spilt by my clumsy oaf feet. Not on patio table’s watch! And certainly not that particular cuppa coffee, because it was empty:

Yep, I used an empty coffee cup to stage my new patio furniture shoot. I wanted to give it that authentic we-actually-use-this-stuff look. Even though we actually haven’t used it much since we’ve been in Brooklyn for work. Tricks of the trade, my friends. Learn it, live it, love it. Or just use the frikkin’ furniture so you don’t have to fake it.

Next up for the patio furniture: I’m going to stain and seal the chairs so they’re not so fresh-from-Home-Depot looking. That’s going down this weekend while Bradley continues his drywall rampage down the staircase. Also, after months of sitting in storage, my fabulous shoe closet is making its debut in our casa. Squee! Not a moment too soon. Our shoe pile is getting out of control.

Stay tuned, peeps. We’re back with a vengeance!

Our Inherited Garden

We spent the day renovating and we have a LOT of pictures and progress to share. I just had to check in with a quickie post and share some really exciting stuff that has nothing to do with taping or mudding or putting up new walls.

When we moved into the house a month and a half ago, the back yard was pretty dead. There were plants and bushes lining the white picket fence, but nothing too exciting. A lot of it just looked like liriope and small bushes. Then, today, this happened:

And this:

And, the one I’m most excited about:

It turns out our boring, ugly liriope bushes are actually lillies. Hands down, my favorite flower in the world! And our boring, ugly not-liriope bushes are completely filled with buds that will soon bloom into lillies:

So. Excited. These are all over the yard — they line the privacy fence — and there are hundreds of buds getting ready to bloom. I can’t wait to have guests visit so I can leave fresh cut flowers in the guest bedroom. And in the kitchen all summer long.

We also had a weird, gnarly, twisted old stump in our yard, but in the matter of 2 weeks, it turned into this:

A very live — and very out of control — grapevine. (You can also see our lily bushes in the background along the fence).

We had no idea we inherited a grapevine, and we have no idea how to care for it. But it doesn’t seem like it should be growing all over the place like it currently is. While Bradley mudded the Smurf room ceiling, Iifted as much of the stump as I could and guided it up to the trellis. I also wrapped some of the longer vines around the trellis so they would grow up instead of out onto the grass.

We’re planning on cutting down the hideous trellis when we renovate the laundry room, but we had to tweak our plans a little. We’ll leave up the wood that the vine is growing on, and chop down everything else. And next year, we’ll put up a much sexier trellis before the grapevine starts taking over so it isn’t such an eyesore. We’re hoping by then, we’ll actually have the time to hang out in our yard. Right now, we know it only as the place between the house where we’re doing some serious renovating and the garage where we keep our tools, supplies and construction garbage.

Speaking of which, we’ll be back soon with a real update on how the Smurf room & guest bedroom are doing. We’re getting so close to the home stretch now, and we’re getting super antsy about cracking open a can of paint and really finishing up those walls. Stay tuned!

Cutest. Neighbors. EVER!

We spent a couple of hours this weekend yanking my dreams out by the root. How’s that for drama?

It’s always been a dream of mine to live in a brick house covered in ivy in the English countryside.

With a white picket fence and flowers growing in the yard.

3 out of 4 ain’t bad. Sure, it’s no English countryside, but we think rural Pennsylvania is pretty charming, too. And we were smitten by our ivy-covered wall.

Sadly, it turns out ivy growing on a brick house is bad news. It creeps up the wall and pushes mortar out of the way, which loosens the bricks. It grows under window frames, through screens, up chimneys. In general, ivy is a really pretty pain in the butt.

Really, really pretty pain in the butt.

We noticed that our ivy had torn down a rain gutter and the wall was wet all the time. If we had drywall walls, we could be in serious mold-and-water-damage trouble. Yipes. Good thing we haven’t redone the walls on that side of that house yet. The ivy had to go.

We woke up early one morning and got to work. It was pretty brainless work (the best kind for early mornings!). Grab a vine, pull, toss, repeat.

Our ivy has been growing for a while, and some of the vines were an inch thick. We had to resist the urge to go all George of the Jungle on them. We’ve been living in the neighborhood for less than a month, and should probably wait a while before letting our neighbors see the full extent of our nerdiness.

We found some surprises in the ivy. An old bird’s nest:

A spoon:

A gross dead bug that fell on my arm, causing me to have a minor hissy fit:

There was also an empty one-gallon milk jug and a second old bird’s nest that I totally forgot to photograph because I was distracted. Bradley introduced me to some neighbors and I died from an overdose on cuteness:

Baby. Bunnies.

Bradley was yanking out some vine roots when he heard a rustle under the dead leaves. He checked it out and discovered the bunny hideout. 3 palm-sized fuzzballs live in a little burrow on the side of our house. These are, without a doubt, the most adorable neighbors we’ve ever had. (No offense to any previous and also very cute neighbors.)

We’d both heard the old myth that if you touch a baby bunny, their mother will abandon them. A quick check on the iPhone confirmed that it really is a myth, so we carefully reached in and checked out our adorable little neighbors.

We wanted to make sure that our vine-yanking didn’t hurt the bunnies. They were fine, but probably a little scared. I would be too if someone lifted the roof off my house and pulled me out to coo and squeal in my face.

There was a lot of talk about putting bunnies in our pockets and taking them everywhere with us, but we carefully put them back in their bunny hole and covered it back up. We left the roots of the ivy near the bunny hideout in tact for now. We can dig them up in a few weeks after the bunnies move out. We were also planning on spraying some Roundup around the area, but we’ll save that for later, too.

We got most of the ivy de-rooted. Now it’s just a matter of getting a big broom to clean up the rootless ivy that’s still hanging out up top. Hopefully that’s going to be dead by the time we get around to it.

Before we left the house the next day, we checked up on our bunnies to make sure they were OK. That was the official story. The real reason was because we wanted to say goodbye. By the time we go back to the house, our bunny neighbors will be old enough to move out.

The bunnies were doing well. It seemed like their nest was a little more built up than the day before. Their mom had taken some of our downed ivy and piled it on top of the bunny hole. The bebez were warm and seemed calm and….snugglier. The one we lifted out of the burrow nuzzled our hands. When I scratched the spot behind her ear, she closed her eyes and leaned into my fingers. I think my next DIY project will be gluing my broken heart back together. Too much cuteness. Couldn’t handle it.

Before putting them back in their bunny hole, we invited our new favorite neighbors to come hang out in our yard whenever they want. This invitation totally crushes my other dream of having a backyard veggie garden, since bunnies are the gardener’s enemy — but we’ll cross that bridge next summer.