Educator. Engineer. Experimenter.
I got the urge to build a spice rack out of a discarded shipping crate today lol My wife is coming home from vacation soon and I wanted to do something for her (cooking related). We’ve needed to organize our spice situation for a long time. I wanted our spices to be within reach and…
Today I helped my dad and former coworkers renew the horse/pony loading ramp at Give Kids The World (Keaton’s Korral). The older ramp was worn out and potentially dangerous at this point. After the maintenance crew gutted the rotted wood, we replaced a few framing beams along with ALL of the deck boards. It was…
Recently, I replaced 11 windows of various sizes in my in-laws old house. The new windows come from Home Depot and are double-layer, gas-filled, Low-E coated, energy efficiency vinyl windows. In addition to the thermal transfer improvements, the sound dampening is impressive. Overall (with Pro discount) all the windows and materials cost me around $1600…
Recently, our voluntary neighborhood association looked into restoring the bronze signs that commemorate our historic neighborhood, which inevitably were covered with patina. We looked at various options, but ultimately decided to try restoring them ourselves. I had previously cleaned up a 30 year old bronze memorial in the area, so I had some practice. Below…
Behold, my first attempt at restoring a 30 year old bronze memorial (plaque). It took me a few hours, but I was taking pictures after each stage and waiting for it to dry (and heat up) between coatings. Here are some before and after pics: Patina is an exterior surface change to a…
My in-laws bought a cute but ancient (1940s) house a few years ago, and while the porch looked good from a distance, it was rotted and structurally unsturdy. This year one of the deck boards broke, and it was clear that the whole porch needed to be replaced as soon as possible. So we built…
It took a loooooooooooooooooooooong time, but we finally finished our house addition. It’s actually been “finished” for 8 months or so, but we’ve been doing some landscaping and waiting for the city to approve our new fence. We added roughly 800 sqft to our house and remodeled another 400 or so (almost entirely downstairs). Tom…
Built a modern-looking wall-mounted trellis over a recent break. I mounted it to our outside garage wall, along the walkway to our front door. I wanted something both ornamental and natural in that space, and this is what I came up with… It took only 3 days of part time work, and most of that…
Built a lizard house for our garden with my son, using leftover construction materials.
Today I helped The Parke House Academy build a new fence for their little ones (lower division). A few of the 4×4 posts were reclaimed from my fence that I was replacing. After building, I sanded the low gateway fence to help avoid any unnecessary splinters 🙂