Makerr... Monday: Tin Can Planter

Photo from Apartment Therapy

[Charles] So I'm a day behind on Maker Monday. The good news is I found a super cool repurposed planter on Apartment Therapy that fit the bill today. They took an oversized vegetable oil can from a restaurant and fit a little tree in it. They had to do a little metal work to get the top off and roll the edges down, but all in all it's a pretty quick little project. Seems like the perfect thing for a miniature lemon or olive tree... Here's the link for the how to

Maker Monday: DIY Antennas

Photo from Instructables
[Charles] So a couple of years ago when the economy really tanked and things got pretty financially tight at the house, we decided to cut all we could. Eventually that meant the cable. I know. The DVR. The movies. The constant flood of DIY shows and ideas. It all had to go. At $100 bucks a month or whatever, it just couldn't go on. So we got an antenna and luckily the digital channel conversion was underway so instantly we had some channels. The cheapie antennas we bought worked pretty well and got most of the channels because we apparently happen to live near a lot of channel towers.

However, eventually you will get to the point that the reception craps out in the middle of some critical point in a show that you are way too invested in because - if you don't watch much TV then apparently you get way more attached to the little bit you do watch (that's my theory anyway). So there you are watching the killer getting caught on Castle and it blips out right in the middle of the pithy comeback of our fantastic protagonist... ARRRGH!

Why am I telling you this? Because you too can cut the cable and join us and maybe you won't have to suffer like we have. I refuse to spring for a huge pole mounted antenna that can take down airplane traffic but I'd like a little better reception. Thank you internets! Doing a quick search for "DIY tv antenna" turned up all sorts of open source antenna plans and even a Make magazine video on how to do it. There was even an Instructable on how to add one to the Dish that you don't use anymore. Now if I can get this thing together and put in the attic without dying of heatstroke I might just get to see the end of Parenthood again without chucking my tv into the alley in a rage. It's not for the faint of heart folks but if you want to join us - it is awfully satisfying...

Maker Monday: Compost Bin with Style

Photo from Tiny Meat

[Charles} Saw this one last week on Re-Nest and knew it was gonna make the list. I have two - half -hearted composters for my leaves which are marginally ugly but also not totally functional. I built a three sided box for one that makes it easier to turn over the leaves but also they spill out and look pretty bad most of the time. The other one is a round piece of fencing that is chock full of leaves. It's prettier but also near impossible to turn the compost when it gets too full. So anyway, I like this idea. Way prettier and it should get a little more air circulating. The front boards are slats that can pulled out to access the compost. I wonder how to keep it from getting too dry? Maybe a solid bottom? Most of all, if I can make one like this, I should get a lot less weird looks from visitors about my strange composting attempts... Sounds like they got the plans for it here.

Maker Monday: Concrete Storage

Photos from Core77
[Charles] I did a little project with concrete resurfacing material last week and enjoyed it so much I thought I'd look for something even cooler. I was fixing the slope on a sill in our shower so the water runs back into the shower and doesn't puddle - pretty sexy right?! Well anyway it was well overdue, but I just happened to have some left over concrete resurfacer to use. I like this stuff because it is super strong even in thin layers without reinforcement wire. So lo and behold, today I'm looking for something to talk about and here is this cool thing over on Core77. I've seen tons of usb drive ideas, wood, plastic, star wars characters, old teeth whatever, but this is concrete. Concrete is cold and substantial and oh so modsexy. So see what you think of these little drives. I especially like that they carved little semiconductor board looking patterns in them. Now if only I had done that instead of just putting my handprint... Wait though - how cool would it be to put your thumbprint in the concrete as it sets up! Oh yeah, concrete project here we come.

Maker Monday: Make A Difference for Earth Day

Photo from Trees for the Future on Flickr

[Charles] April 22nd is Earth Day - but I haven't heard much on the news this year? We're kind of growing numb to Earth Day as a society and it seems snarky negativism rules the airwaves. Why save the environment when the economy is in the toilet and all of the big companies just spew oil into the ocean, melt down their nukes, and turn Earth Day into a PR bonanza where they sell us some widget that is going to save the planet.

For me, I am completely frustrated with the current political state of our country and state and find it so hard to get excited about making a difference. I guess though, if I just lay down and stop fighting then they really do win.

So, instead of encouraging people to compost, or recycle, or to turn up your thermostat because I believe that most of us already are doing a lot, I want to encourage us to take a little bit of money and spin it into something positive. I'm advocating for what I believe is a very worthy environmental organization - one of the biggest groups involved in Earth Day - The Earth Day Network. They are doing really great work and I want people to get behind their call for A Billion Acts of Green, but especially their initiative called The Canopy Project.

Trees are really what got me into environmentalism as a kid. I remember seeing clearcut forests in my East Texas countryside and watching the trees get bulldozed and burned to make room for gas wells and sprawling pasture land. This project is planting trees in places that really can benefit from them and working with local groups to get it done. Places like Haiti, Brazil, and Mexico are all going to have plantings that will be tailored to the needs of the local communities. The group in Haiti is called Trees for the Future and they are planting beneficial trees on an island that has seen much of its good soil eroded through poor management of land and trees for generations. Take a few minutes to check them out or just get in there and drop $10 in their tank. These folks are making a difference and can use the support of all us that can't leave our under water mortgages and crappy commutes to join the fight in person.

Maker Monday: Scrap Wood Honeycomb Shelves

Photos from Arrow & Apple Blog
[Charles] Check out these cool honeycomb shelves out of scrap wood from Arrow & Apple. Saw this over on a post from AT. I like that you can use small pieces of wood for this kind of shelf. They didn't use a backer and they just screwed each one to the wall with brackets so I'm a little concerned about how much weight they'll handle. I guess the point really isn't to load these up and well, I 'm always overbuilding things because you never know when someone is going to try doing chinups on your stuff right? I really like this though because you can use all those small pieces of wood which are a problem for every wood shop. Any small wood projects are life savers and you hate building yet another tiny box to store more tiny pieces of wood... Great job folks. Head over to their link on the top to see the rest of the photos!

Maker Monday: Cinder Block Wall Planters

Photo from Annette Gutierrez
[Charles] Here we go folks. I may have finally figured out how to pretty up the end of our ugly driveway... I've been thinking about this for a while but I haven't seen anybody ready (crazy enough) to try it until now... Take a bunch of cinder blocks which are cheaper than most pots and stack em and plant them to make a living planter wall. Super cheap. This one used landscape super adhesive which is really strong stuff - we used it on our $5 block seats a few years ago. They also used wire cloth and rocks to keep the soil from leaving in a hurry. We've recently started up a nice batch of succulents and I agree that would be the way to go on something like this... Thanks Treehugger!

Maker Monday: Transformer Tables

[Charles] I know it's a few days late but to be fair this project is a few years late. I spend a lot of time thinking about transformer furniture. Specifically, I think and sketch and conceive a lot on a transformer dining table. The slideshow from Treehugger here has a good cross section of what is out there and it also features the one that they all get measured against... The Capstan or Fletcher which is pictured above. My friend Nicole has been asking for her own version of a transformer table for years. I must have 5 different unrealized versions on my hard drive that were either too hard to make, too complicated to convert, or just too plain ugly. For people that like to solve problems though this is a fun one. Check out the slideshow and well if you have a good way to go from say a 36" round to a 72" round with less than 25 grand on the price tag - let me know. There's nothing cooler than being able to take your intimate little breakfast table up to Thanksgiving dinner size in ten seconds flat. You'll have to watch the video for that though...

Maker Monday: Electric Umbrella

Photos from Instructables user sockmaster

[Charles] It took me quite a few articles and digs to end up on an Electric Umbrella, but well here it is. I wasn't looking for it and that made it much more intriguing of course. I actually was just wondering how to make an LED light bulb. I dug into Google and Make magazine and Instructables and read quite a bit about LED reading lamps and flashlight circuits. It sounds pretty simple really - you get some LEDs and resistors and a DC power source and wire it up. Of course there are some simple calculations about getting the resistors right and well you have to keep in mind that LEDs are electrically directional. It doesn't sound too bad though. I still didn't find a lightbulb exactly but this umbrella is pretty cool and it might be just the thing for long walks home in a neighborhood that isn't too pedestrian friendly...

Maker Monday: A Tiny House Blog

Photos from Evan and Gabby's Tiny House Blog
[Charles] We've been a little fascinated by tiny houses, by which I mean, one room one bath sort of things that you can only fit the essentials in for a while. There are these things though Tiny Houses that are being built by a company that will also send out plans to you if you want to build your own. These houses are built on a trailer and are beautiful tiny cottage things with lots of wood and simple living in mind. Today I'm showing some bits from a blog where a couple shows how they are doing it themselves. This week they are sealing the deck which we just did last week on our house.

We uncovered some beautiful antique pine boards that have been hiding under our linoleum for years with us completely unaware. Maybe some day we'll ditch the 1100 sqft mansion that we inhabit for something this tiny - definitely would force us as Thoreau would say to "live deliberately".

Maker Monday: Pallet Wood Desk from Funky Junk Interiors

Photos from Funky Junk Interiors
[Charles] When I first saw the photos of this post on Apartment Therapy I wondered where the heck these folks got their pallets to get wood that pretty? Well as I read up, the top boards are actually cedar plank castoffs from their neighbor.

The framework is all from pallets so I'll let this slide but trust me if you're gonna use pallet wood for a desk top, you should probably have access to a planer. That being said, this thing is pretty - maybe a little bit too country for me but it would be a different story if the rest of the room was more industrial or modern. Imagine this desk in your high-rise window overlooking downtown - ahhh that's more like it...

And here I thought I was the only person who does their design sketches on the back of an envelope?! I love this photo cause that's exactly how it goes at my place!

Maker Monday: CFL with Style - The Plumen

Photos from Plumen website
[Charles] As I read discouraging politically charged posts about how phasing out incandescent bulbs is an assault on freedom, I am well... discouraged. I think of how people reacted to the idea of their whale oil being pulled off the hardware store shelves or how life might be if we just burned all of our trash to light our homes. Progress is inevitable and instead of just whining about it, some designers are actually working to make it part of a more beautiful world.

I'll admit that I've marveled at the fine details of an antique filament on bulbs I've found and replaced. They are beautiful in their insect-wing sort of detailing and I'll certainly wonder at movies that used them when they no longer exist on our store shelves. The thing is, they've got these things called CFL bulbs which are much more efficient and are probably the simplest thing in the world to do besides perhaps actually turning lights off to save energy indoors. Samuel Wilkinson a UK designer decided to take the long tubes of CFL lights and instead of spinning them tight so they can be hidden in a fixture - he's uncoiled them in a ballet dance of curving shapes. The bulb takes its name Plumen from the showy plume of a bird's feathers. These, to me, are the new romantic bulb and they look great in a room with no shade just throwing the maximum light. Let me know what you think of them. They managed to win a Brit Insurance Design Award for 2011 so I can't be the only person that finds them intriguing...

Maker Monday: DIY Plywood Coffee Table from MAKE

Photos reposted from MAKE
[Charles] I'm a fan of MAKE magazine for sure. Definitely this and Readymade are the go-to mags for me as a maker for ideas and cool projects. Through a bunch of random links, I ended up on this project today that is very similar to one of my concepts. I've always liked the idea of slanting the legs of a table with slots and allowing the weight of the top to hold it together. I like this one and with a little tweaking to lock in the top with another slot you could get rid of hardware all together. I love gypsy furniture that can just lay in the back of the car when you're ready to move. Let me know what you think...

Here's how they cut the slots - definitely good work for a router if you've got one...

Here's the base - supported just by locking into the slots that were straight in the legs and angled in the cross support. Pretty simple right?

Check out the entire how to on Make if you want...

Maker Monday: Wax Floors vs. Poly

Photos from Christopherson Wood Floors

[Charles] This morning's post on Apartment Therapy got me thinking about our wood floors at home. A few years ago when we first bought our home, we were in love with the wood under the floors. We first uncovered our beautiful antique wood floors that were hiding under years of carpet, glue down tile, and lots of black nasty glue and found amazing heart pine wood.

Almost every book and Home Depot guy out there explains how to sand and polyurethane your floors. The thing is, I really don't like that nasty stuff and wrapping my floors in shrink wrap that scratches and stinks up the house with VOCs just didn't seem like the way to go. Amazingly enough, one guy that did recommend oil and waxed floors as an alternative was Ty Pennington from Extreme Makeover Home Edition (back then he was the carpenter on one of TLC's makeover shows). Anyway, I did some more digging and decided oil and wax was for us. If you want to do it, first off you have to sand your floors just like every other floor job.

The good news is that if you treat them right, you'll never have to use that sander again. We opted for Tung Oil although I've heard of plenty of alternatives with some truly eco-friendly options out there for more cash... You basically have to wipe down the whole floor with mineral spirits to get rid of any left over dust then you pour the oil on a soft cloth and wipe it on the wood. You need good coverage but you don't want it to build up to any real thickness. After a couple of coats of oil, you can wax the floor with floor wax and steel wool. Polish the wax and you'll have a completely different look to your floors. An oil and wax finish looks more matte and more antique to me. The other nice thing is that it can be scratched, but a little sanding or often just a little re-application of oil and wax can cover it right up. With polyurethane, when it gets scratched, it is hard to cover the damage without taking the whole finish off and starting over.

Now I read about how to clean up the wax finish from Apartment Therapy today and they were showing how to fix and clean up scratches and ground in dirt on cork floors. I didn't even know you could use the same stuff for cork, but why not? It's gorgeous and I'm still in love with our oil and wax floor after all these years...

Cork floor cleanup Photo from Apartment Therapy

Maker Monday: A Modern Line @ New Shop Kaleidoscope for the Home

Photos from A Modern Line

[Charles] It's hard to ignore the draw of beautiful mid-century chairs like those in the photo. We love mixing things like this into our modern and industrial style, but sometimes you find a piece of furniture that you just want restored exactly to its original glory...

Our neighborhood is getting a fantastic new addition this week with the design store Kaleidoscope for the Home. It's a joint venture of Sherry King from Sherry's Yesterdaze, designer Karen Brown, and Sherry's husband David Call. I wanted to feature them in Maker Monday because as you'll see from the photos they have some beautifully restored Heywood Wakefield pieces mixed in to their staging. One type of maker that often gets overlooked is the restorer. This shop a mix of creative talents from the area and one of those is David Call who owns A Modern Line . His business specializes as a refinishing and rescue service for Modern Line Heywood Wakefield furniture from the 40's to 60's.

Looking at the blog for A Modern Line, I can see that he also handles other brands of furniture from the period, but he really shines with some of the most amazing restorations of H/W I've seen. Most of you know we are not restorers and have our way with furniture that often makes our antiquing friends crazy, but I can appreciate the delicate and painstaking work that goes into beautiful restoration.

Also, if you're going to restore something - make it something truly worth the work like these pieces. I've attached a few photos, but be sure to check out the new shop if you are in the area. This Thursday they are having an opening from 6-9 pm at 6415 N. Florida Ave and it will definitely be a great day for the neighborhood to see another design business move in and draw traffic from all those "other" parts of town. Good luck David, Sherry, and Karen and keep up the great work!

Maker Monday: Salvage Loft Tour

Photos from Sarah Rainwater on Apartment Therapy

[Charles] I was working on some plumbing this weekend and this piping just cracks me up. I ran into this post on Apartment Therapy today. I love rough and rusty salvage in the home, but these folks really did it right. I love everything about the place. They have old sinks and tables re-purposed but also they have lots of little funny artistic touches. I absolutely love the figure eight knot that they soldered in their copper pipes and the old steam gauges are fantastic.

Thanks for the inspiration, I hope you open to home tours because if I'm in Providence, I'm dropping by for tea on that cool antique stove...

Maker Monday: Tampa Street Market Coffee Table

[Charles] Here's a recent custom piece that we made for a Tampa home. The piece was made entirely from salvaged wood and was built to customer specific dimensions. Finding wood that is the correct size and will give the right look can be difficult on short notice, but we turned this table around quickly in just a few weeks.

The top and skirt pieces are pine 3/4" planks that I sanded and biscuited together. The skirt was done in a wrap around primitive table style. This idea was borrowed from many of the old farmhouse tables that we see in our searches. It's a strong method to secure the table without fussy angle cutting and miters. I drilled through the outside pieces and nailed in square nails that I found a while back and have been keeping in the cabinet just for projects like this. They give the piece a nice antique look but have to be predrilled carefully because they are large and tapered with a real tendency to split the wood.

The legs are cypress wood that was taken from a roof beam we purchased at Schiller's Salvage in Tampa. Finding wood for nice sized chunky legs is usually the hard (and expensive) part. Luckily the dimensions of coffee tables are shorter so we don't need as long a piece. The beam was cracked on one end but there was enough good wood to give us four legs. Definitely measure and plan out your idea well before you go searching or you will buy material you can't use. I almost bought both of these beams until we got a confirmation on the table height at the last minute!

Hope you like the piece. I think it turned out really nice. We stained it with a custom mix of stain colors to match the room per the designer's request and finished it with a hand oiled and waxed finish. The oil and wax again add to the antique look and luster of an old piece of furniture. All the little nail holes and damage of the old wood show up better with the stain and help give this table elder statesman cred right away. Thanks for checking it out!

Maker Monday : Soap Flakes?!

Photos from Core77 blog

[Charles] I love this idea. All of the best soaps you find come in bars. All those interesting homemade soaps that you can't pass up at the market. Unfortunately they get wet and soggy and then you need someplace to set them down so the sink gets gross where they sit. Then you go out and buy a soap dish and you have to wash it every so often and all of this because the soap gets wet when you use it. What you really need is just the smallest bit of the soap to actually do the work.

This came from Core77's blog and it is a project of a designer Nathalie Stampfli who I think did this for her graduation project at Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands.

You get this cool little cheese grater thing going on and all you get are flakes. You push on the bar and it grates the bottom of the bar into your hand. Now you have no plastic bottles for your liquid soap which is mostly water anyway and you can make your bar soap last as long as it should and actually work like a liquid soap by making it into small easily soluble pieces! The other one is like a winding pepper mill for the shower which I'm a little less excited by but I could come around to.

Mechanically it looks a little simplistic and I wonder how it does if your soap gets too small but honestly those concerns are pretty tiny. The complicated squirting devices we see everywhere for liquid soap are much worse than this with their plastic parts all working to annoy you. Congratulations, I would love to see this in production!

Maker Monday: Re-Nest Best Sustainable Bedroom Furniture

Photo from Apartment Therapy Re-Nest
[Charles] When it's cold like this week, I want to go to bed early and sleep late. Lots of blankets and lots of snooze button action seems to define my winter pattern. I would love to get up early and go for a run and feel good about myself but... until then, I'll be dreaming of how to make our room more lovable and less leave-able. Here's a re-post from Apartment Therapy of the best sustainable bedroom furniture of 2010. One piece that stood out to me is the nightstand that looks like we could make a chair-hacked version from some of the broken chair pieces we find. What do you think?

See the chair-like side pieces? The salvaged screen or grate? This one gets me thinking...

Here's the full article link.

Maker Monday: Screw Screws Here Comes the Swiss

[Charles] I sometimes get obsessed with the idea that furniture doesn't really need screws and nails. Designs turn over and over in my head as the pieces lock together with tabs and holes and the weight of each piece locks the others together. And then every once in a while I see somebody who does it really really well. This popped up this morning on Treehugger - designer Colin Schaelli is building con.temporary furniture that does just that. It does it in beautiful raw wood that is designed around a tatami mat size that fits in a car easily and can be transported for the new mobile gypsies that we have turned out to be. Apparently it's good for sleeping... those silly swiss, they are so artsy? I guess you do what you can to show off the furniture. See what you think - me, I'm in love.