October 27, 2017

Do It Yourself

There are a lot of things I want for our house. I always have a running list in my head of things I want to do and change. However, as much as I would like to just go get it all and do it now, I don’t like the price tag of most things. That’s where DIY comes in. I enjoy creating things myself most of the time because I like being able to say “I did that!”

At our last house there were quite a few things I took on myself over the 2.5 years we lived there. We thought we would be there long but circumstance led us to sell and buy a new house. Sometimes I wish I could have brought some of it with us that we left behind or sold when we moved. But I know there will be lots of time to do more projects in our new house.

I don’t know if they still do these classes but for a while I went to some social nights at Home Depot where the led you through doing DIY projects. One was making a plant stand. It seems simple enough but if you don’t have the right tools to cut the board and put the pieces together it can be tricky. The led us step by step and we ended up with these cute stands. I placed mine by our front door to welcome visitors. (although I never remembered to actually water the plant.)

 

Next up was a glider that was given to us from my Mom when she rearranged things at her house. It was heavy and sturdy and we put it on our back porch. problem was that it wasn’t really meant for outdoors, but since our porch was covered I figured it would be fine. It did OK out there but the weather got to it because it needed to be resealed or painted.

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The idea of painting it seemed daunting because there were so many slats involved that I thought it would be hard to get all the nooks and crannies painted properly. I decided that the easiest way to go about it was to take it basically apart. I took all the slats on the back and the seat off and then tried to make sure to keep them in order to put back on.

After that I sanded each one individually which took a few days. Then painted them all and waited for them to dry before putting it all back together. When I took them apart they were numbered on the backs by whoever made it, but in order to paint them I had to cover them up so I was real conscious to keep them in the correct order when they were drying. It wasn’t too hard to put back together and it really added a pop of color to our back porch.

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I know it looks like I really like the color teal, but it’s actually more about using the color I already had on hand so I didn’t have to spend as much money on these projects.

The last project I want to mention is our garden. At our first house we had a small garden in the back yard and in order to create it I bought the garden box kits from Home Depot. They worked and looked nice for about a year. With anything boxed I feel they were a bit expensive for what you got. They were $30 a box and the wood was thin and not the proper type for longetivity. After the second year of using them they started to rot and fall apart.

 

At our second house when I went to start creating my garden I decided to create your own boxes. I did some searching to see how other people had build theirs and what wood they used. Most posts said they used treated cedar because it stands up to weather well. That makes sense because the outside of that house was cedar paneling and it was build in the 70’s and the original paneling is still up.

I went to home depot and got all the wood pieces, corner brackets, and wood screws. I then measured for my design. I went with three 3 ft x 3 ft boxes along the back row and then did two 4 ft x 3 ft boxes in the second row so I could separate them by 1 ft in order to be able to walk between the boxes to reach all the plants. Here’s my written plan I came up with in my head.

After cutting all the pieces using a table saw and connecting them. I lugged them to the back yard and put my plan in action. (I had previously cleared the area and was using plastic bins to start the plants. I personally thing it turned out great and looked cute. I intended to grow the garden area but then we moved. The temporary gate around it is because my pups like to run through the plants and they kept squishing the plants! Which you can see by Nigel hanging out in the boxes when I was setting it up.

I put weed paper down first before the soil to try and keep the weeds from growing so fast! When we moved they had already started a small garden here, but had let it get out of control. I cleaned it up and planted some new plants and intend to grow it more, but we have so many yard projects on our list it might be awhile before I get to it. I’ll be sure to share my plans for the garden as it grows!

Do you like to DIY things? Tell me what projects you’ve taken on in the comments! Do you garden- what are your plants of choice?

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