Posted on July 27, 2020
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 […]
Posted on June 26, 2020
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 […]
Posted on May 20, 2020
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 […]
Posted on December 20, 2019
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 […]
Posted on June 26, 2019
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 […]
Posted on March 24, 2019
Built a lizard house for our garden with my son, using leftover construction materials.
Posted on January 3, 2019
Helped The Parke House Academy build a new fence for their little ones. Some of the 4x4s were reclaimed from my fence that I was replacing. After building, sanding was needed to make it nice and smooth.
Posted on December 23, 2018
I decided to do something useful with our dilapidated old fence that needed to be replaced. A simple looking, rustic ceiling light/chandelier at First Watch caught my eye. Theirs is larger, but my creation is similar. I saved some of the rest of the wood for rustic wall paneling I intend to do later on. […]
Posted on April 8, 2017
The entire downstairs of our new house needed new floors. So we paid a floor removal company to rip it all up and we slowly replaced it room by room. First we tackled the front room (foyer / living room). We laid some dark, distressed-looking, stranded engineered locking bamboo that we purchased from Floor and […]