Make-It Monday: Credenza repair

This is such a small project, I hesitate even to post it, but it was one I put off for a long time because I thought it was going to be much more complicated than it was.

The credenza I fashioned a few months ago from a set of storage cubes and four mid-century-style legs was not quite as well-supported as it needed to be, and when my parents were visiting a few weeks ago, Dad noticed it was developing a slight dip in the middle. He recommended I add a set of legs to the middle to shore it up.

Because I’d installed the others at an angle, I assumed I’d have to shorten the new ones before I could install them vertically in the middle — not a difficult process, but one with just enough steps to seem daunting — so I bought legs and installation hardware and promptly stuck them in my craft closet, where they remained, quietly generating low-level stress in the back of my mind every time I looked at the credenza.

A couple of weekends ago, I got sick of thinking about them, grabbed a tape measure and the new legs and installation hardware and set about taking measurements so I could trim them to the proper length …

whereupon I discovered that the designers of the legs and mounting hardware had already anticipated someone might need vertical supports on a large piece of furniture and had adjusted for that eventuality within the design of the hardware, thus obviating the necessity of trimming anything. All that procrastinating, and all I really needed to do was unload the bookcase, flip it over, and install the new legs.

Shored up and back to normal.

I left all the books stacked at the ends of the credenza for a week or so to give gravity a chance to repair the dip that had developed while the middle was unsupported; two weeks later, it’s balanced properly, reloaded, and much sturdier. It still isn’t perfect, but it should be fine until I can score something nicer from Joybird or (’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished) Herman Miller.

Sitting in the living room feels much more relaxing now.

Emily

Make-It Monday: DIY phone speakers

Several weeks ago, I wandered down the book aisle at Lowe’s. The book aisle is the main reason I can’t be trusted at a hardware store without adult supervision. I start thumbing through some home-improvement book, thinking about all the stuff I’d like to learn to do, and the next thing you know, Ron is coming home from work to find the bathroom sink on the curb and me sitting on the bathroom floor with a wrench in my hand, tightening the supply-line valves on our brand-new faucets. (This has happened twice, and given the condition of our current vanity, I think the odds are fairly high it’s going to happen again as soon as I find a sink I like.)

Ron was with me this time, so I just came home with a copy of 5-Gallon Bucket Book by Chris Peterson.

Anybody who’s ever walked through a feed store with me already knows I can’t resist a 5-gallon bucket. They’re just so bloody practical. I’ve got one I use for cleaning the pond, one for cleaning the quail pen, one in the backyard that Ron uses as a dog-poop receptacle, one for mixing laundry detergent, one with a spigot attached for filtering honey, one in the basement for mixing cold-process soap, two on the porch for growing plants, and one tucked in a cabinet for use as a trash can.

Some of the projects in 5-Gallon Bucket Book are kind of goofy, but some seemed practical (swamp cooler, pond filter, worm bin), and a handful were intriguing enough, I thought they might be worth trying later.

One of the intriguing projects was an acoustic speaker dock, which I built last week from a pair of buckets, a 10-inch length of 2-inch PVC pipe, and a couple of PVC slip couplings.

The instructions called for sealing the whole thing with PVC cement and silicone caulk, but I skipped that step so I can disassemble the system and store it easily when I’m not using it.

I think the finished product — pictured above (minus the iPhone itself, which I used to take the photo) — works pretty well for listening to Joni Mitchell while I’m cleaning the house on a lazy Saturday afternoon, and it would make a killer science-fair project for one of my nieces or nephews in a few years.

Emily

Make-It Monday: Bullet Journal

I kept seeing people on Pinterest talking about something called a “bullet journal.” At first glance, it looked like a good way to spend altogether too much time turning a planner into a craft project, but a couple of people I really respect kept pinning stuff related to bullet journals, so I clicked through to see what the fuss was about.

If I understood what I read correctly, bullet journals are a sort of hybrid of a planner, a to-do list, and a journal. Given my dependence on to-do lists and my longtime fondness for planners — particularly the customizable sort — I decided it was probably worth investing a couple of hours and $20 for a Moleskine notebook to set one up and see how it went. I’ve certainly owned more expensive planners over the years, so I figured I might as well give it a try.

I set this up wrong because I couldn’t see the entire image on this part of the Bullet Journal website — you’re supposed to put the month on the left and use the facing page for tasks — but given my New Year’s resolution, I think giving myself less space for a task list is probably a good idea.

April 12: Good times never seemed so good.

As far as I can tell, the big difference between a bullet journal and a regular planner lies in the index. You number the pages and slug them as you would notecards for a research paper, then use that information to make an index as you go.

I’m still not 100 percent convinced this isn’t just an unduly complicated means of customizing a Dayrunner, but it fits in my purse better, and it looks a little neater than the pile of Post-Its, napkins, and scraps of paper that usually end up scattered across my desk, waiting for me to do something about them. I doubt I’ll really use it as a journal (anything personal enough to go on paper instead of online is probably too personal for me to be comfortable carrying around with me), but after setting it up and using it for a couple of days, I think it might work well as a planner. If nothing else, it’s a chance to experiment with various features and figure out what I want to include the next time I’m in the mood to make my own Dayrunner refills. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you want to make your own, the guy who came up with the concept has a whole website dedicated to it.

Emily

Make-It Monday: Propagating African violets

I have no idea whether this will work, but I found instructions online for propagating African violets, and since I had a violet growing and blooming like mad, half a bag of leftover potting mix, and an empty plastic salad tub, I thought I’d give them a shot.

Here’s the tub. It creates a mini-greenhouse to keep them warm and moist. The mother plant is in the background.

I had several plants that needed to be repotted, propagated, or both. My aluminum plant — which was rootbound and suffering terribly in the dry air in this house — went into a bigger pot, with a plastic bag over it to keep the leaves from drying out. Meanwhile, my spider plant needed a bigger pot for itself, and I snipped off a couple of its babies and transplanted them while I was at it:

This was the pot that originally held the mother plant. I expect this baby will outgrow it quickly.

Another baby I planted. I love this uber-’70s, avocado-green pot I bought from the Plant Lady.

We’ll see how they do. They look cool on the credenza, where I put CFLs in a couple of faux-mid-century lamps to supplement the decidedly inadequate natural light coming in the front window.

I developed a new appreciation for African violets after a conversation with a young friend in California who messaged me on Twitter to ask what sort of plants would do well in her dorm room. I suggested several species, including African violets, and after looking at some pictures online, she was quite enchanted with them and was looking forward to a plant-shopping trip with her dad. (Good luck, Kadijah! If you ever make it to Missouri, we’ll spend an afternoon poking around the Plant Lady’s shop and Mother Earth Plants.)

Emily

Make-It Monday: Birkenstock maintenance

Anybody who’s known me longer than 10 minutes probably already knows how I feel about Birkenstocks.

These are my dress Birkenstocks. My daily drivers were on my feet.

Birkies, once broken in, are the most comfortable thing in the known universe. I have two pairs, both clogs — a tan suede pair I bought back in 2000 to relieve a back problem caused by my unfortunate platform-heel phase of the late ’90s, and a dark charcoal-gray felt pair I bought in 2012 to comply with the dress code where I worked.

My older Birkenstocks, which are my daily drivers, serve as house slippers, garden clogs, work shoes, vacation companions and good-luck charms. They’ve moved with me at least three times, joined me on a couple of successful job interviews, and come along on too many road trips to count.

Birkies don’t ask much in return, but a little maintenance now and then helps extend their life.

By “maintenance,” I mean you should seal the cork once in a while when it starts to look dull. This takes about five minutes.

Birkenstock makes its own cork sealer, which I’ve used in the past, but I lost my last jar in a move, and the guy at Shawnee Trails told me Barge Cement — which is cheaper — actually works better and lasts longer. Shawnee Trails has been selling Birkenstocks for decades, so I’m inclined to trust their recommendations.

Barge Cement comes with all sorts of terrifying warnings on the label. I’m pretty sure most of the warnings are just there to discourage people from huffing glue, which is probably pointless, because if you’re huffing glue, the fact that it’s carcinogenic isn’t likely to discourage you, but if you’re worried about it, you can wear rubber gloves while you work. I’m not, so I didn’t; I just used a paintbrush to apply the glue and kept my fingers out of it. Anyway, as the police dispatchers say on the scanner: Proceed at your own discretion.

To seal your Birkenstocks, do the following:

1. Clean them. If they’re ridiculously muddy, hose them off; otherwise, you can just wipe them down with a wet paper towel.

2. Let them dry completely.

Squeeze a little Barge Cement on there.

3. Squeeze a little bit of Barge Cement onto the cork and use a cheap foam paintbrush to spread it over all the exposed cork surfaces. If you notice cracks in the cork, work some of the adhesive in there, and if the insole is peeling up, be sure to glue it back down.

Smoothed out.

4. Let the cement cure overnight.

Repeat whenever the cork starts to look dull.

Emily

P.S.: As always, nobody paid me or gave me free stuff to get me to write this blog. But please feel free to contact me if you would like to give me free Birkenstocks.

Make-It Monday: A quick mural job

I spent part of my weekend doing a mural project of a different sort.

A local church has elaborate airbrushed murals covering virtually every wall in its children’s wing. A recent construction project took out part of a mural in an entryway leading to a couple of classrooms, so they hired me to repair it.

It was more difficult than it looked, as I was not only using a different tool (paintbrush vs. airbrush) but was working on a different surface than the original artist and had to try to blend my efforts into what was already there.

After a couple of less-than-satisfying attempts to make my paintbrushes replicate the luminosity and softness of an airbrush, I decided it made more sense to match the previous artist’s work to mine rather than the other way around, so I used a brush to sharpen up some of the existing lines and then sort of feathered the new work into the old while trying to preserve the integrity of the original design as much as possible.

I forgot to take “before” pictures, but here’s what it looked like when I finished. You can see some of the original artist’s airbrush work at the corners and on some of the walls in the background.

The post at the corner is the original artist’s handiwork. About a fourth of the mural on the right-hand side was missing, so my task was to complete it using the same style as the existing work.

If you look closely, you’ll see a slight color variation where the old surface stops and the new surface starts.

It’s not the most exciting project I’ve ever done, but it was a good exercise, I learned a couple of things from it, and everybody who’s seen it seemed happy with it, so I’ll call that a win.

It also served as a good reminder of why I need to learn to use an airbrush at my earliest convenience. Ron ordered me one for Christmas, but it just came in a couple of days ago, so I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. I have a feeling our basement walls are about to get really interesting.

Emily

Make-It Monday: Mural update

Laying in the color is a fairly quick step. The details will take much longer.

This work in progress will probably remain in progress for the foreseeable future, as I have a small part of a very large mural project booked for next weekend, but I’m hoping by the end of winter, I’ll have my bathroom finished. The faux-stone look isn’t difficult, but it’s time-consuming, and I’m having to piecemeal it as time allows — an hour here and a half-hour there.

More color laid in and a little detail work started here and there.

Here’s the section directly below the part I showed you last week.

And here’s that small section below the (nearly) completed part to give you a sense of where it’s going.

I’ll post occasional updates on my progress so you can see the technique. If you like it, feel free to try it on your own wall. It requires more patience than anything else. When it’s all done, I might put together a tutorial.

Emily

Make-It Monday: I paint because I’m lazy

Longtime readers will recall my adventures in drywall repair last winter, necessitated by the slipshod home-improvement work done by the previous owner of this house.

The drywall in our bathroom was installed as poorly as the drywall in the rest of the house, and the paint job was even worse — drips and cracks and alligatored spots everywhere.

I could retape the joints, sand everything down, and repaint the walls in there with some textured finish that would conceal any flaws, but I’m not going to, for two reasons:

1. My projects earlier this year in the bedroom and office taught me that I haaaaaaaate working with drywall in tight spaces and rag-painting around obstacles.

2. I need a sample of trompe l’oeil mural work to show prospective clients, as most of my murals — with the exception of my faux-neon pieces — are done in a more cartoonish style.

With all that in mind, I decided to make the cracks in the bathroom wall look purposeful.

This is a work in progress, obviously, but here’s what I’m up to:

Preliminary sketch.

Closeup of a section that’s about 95 percent finished. I need to come back and soften up some of the mossy patches on the stucco, but this is the upshot.

It’s not perfect, but neither is the wall. Intentional imperfections, rendered in careful detail, seem infinitely preferable to imperfections created as a result of someone’s sloppy attempts at home improvement, and hopefully the end result will be realistic enough to earn me another paying mural gig or two somewhere along the line.

I’ll post an update when I finish the project.

Emily

Make-It Monday: Grape slicer

Here’s another trick that’s been making the rounds on all the Pinterest-clickbait sites. I hadn’t really had occasion to use it until the other day, when I was making another batch of cranberry sauce, but it works well, with a few caveats.

Cutting through a zillion individual grapes takes FOREVER.

I add grapes to my cranberry sauce, because they taste good and give it a more assertive texture. The down side is that they have to be cut in half. Standing around cutting individual grapes in half is a pain, but I remembered a trick I’d seen for slicing cherry tomatoes and decided it probably would work just as well with grapes: Lay a handful of whatever small food you’re slicing on a cutting board, put a plastic lid on top of it, and press down gently while you run a knife just under the lip of the lid to slice through all of the grapes/tomatoes/whatever in one fell swoop.

Hold down the lid to keep the fruit from squirming out from under it while you slice.

In one of the pictures, you can see the edge of a big bread knife, which I’d thought might work well — most of the clickbait pictures I’d seen showed someone using a serrated blade considerably longer than the width of the lid — but in reality, big knives are unwieldy, and I’m klutzy, so I ended up sawing through the lid and making a mess of the grapes. I swapped the bread knife for a plain old steak knife, which was easier to handle and made a much neater cut without damaging the lid.

If you’re just slicing a handful of tomatoes for a salad, I wouldn’t bother getting out the lid, but if you have a large number of small fruits or vegetables to cut, it’s definitely worth rummaging around in the recycler for a plastic lid to speed up the process.

Emily

Make-It Monday: Hot-process soap

Making homemade soap has certain benefits. Among them:

* It’s cheap, especially when compared to the small-batch soaps you find at gift shops and farmers markets.

* You control what goes into it, so if you love one ingredient or hate another, you can find or develop a recipe to suit your preferences. (Teatree essential oil, for instance, is great for treating and preventing skin-level fungal infections, while peppermint and eucalyptus will open your sinuses while you shower.)

* It doesn’t require packaging. For personal use, I keep a Tupperware container full of unwrapped bars in the pantry.

* It makes a nice gift.

Soapmaking has a few drawbacks, the three main ones being that you have to work with lye; you have to be very precise in your measurements, temperatures, times, etc.; and you have to make it six to eight weeks before you plan to use it, lest you end up with chemical burns from insufficiently saponified soap. (Saponification is the chemical process by which lye and oil turn into soap.)

The hot-process method eliminates two of these problems. There is no such thing as soap made without lye, so there’s no workaround for that one, but the heat cooks out most of it, allowing it to saponify fully in two weeks instead of six, and it requires far less precision than the cold-process method, particularly where temperatures are concerned.

My favorite hot-process recipe is one that uses a slow cooker to heat the lye and oil. Rather than plagiarizing it for your convenience, I’m just going to tell you to click here to find it. (Important note: DO NOT use a slow cooker you love dearly or intend to use for anything else. The lye WILL etch the ceramic crock and shorten its lifespan. If you can find a Crock-Pot at a yard sale, that’s probably your best bet.)

It looks awful, but it’s good soap in spite of itself. Just imagine how great it would be if I’d actually stuck to the recipe instead of screwing up and skipping steps.

Remember what I was saying about hot-process recipes being very forgiving? The bars pictured above are from a batch that turned out OK despite the fact I did basically everything wrong because I hadn’t made soap in a while, forgot some important steps, and had to make adjustments on the fly. It still turned out ugly but usable, which absolutely would not have been the case if I’d been using the cold-process method.

If you read the recipe closely and follow the directions carefully, your finished product should be much prettier than mine, and eminently suitable for using at home or giving as gifts.

Happy soapmaking!

Emily