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One of the nicest new trends of recent years is really the revival and rebranding of something very old: the smaller dwelling. Over the last few months, I have built just such a structure, and it has turned out to be a rather cool experience. In fact, I’m typing this article for you from within […]
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The post Small Changes, Big Differences: 5 Low-Cost Ways to Give Your Home a New Look first appeared on Century 21®.
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The post 5 Easy DIY Ways to Boost Energy Efficiency appeared first on Apartment Living Tips – Apartment Tips from ApartmentGuide.com.
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In our dual income society, many of the DIY skills older generations learned have disappeared. Weâre used to outsourcing everything. But should we?
The post Should You Learn The DIY Skills Previous Generations Learned? appeared first on Bible Money Matters and was written by Melissa. Copyright © Bible Money Matters – please visit biblemoneymatters.com for more great content.
I grew up in the country. My family always had a vegetable garden. For us, gardening meant a large plot, plowed and raked, then planted with long, widely-space rows of vegetables. It also meant weeding and hoeing, weeding and hoeing. Lots and lots of weeding and hoeing.
Gardening was a chore.
When my ex-wife and I bought our first home, we both wanted a vegetable garden, but we didn’t want the drudgery that came with it. Besides, we didn’t have a big space in the country â we had an average city lot. Fortunately, we discovered Mel Bartholomew’s Square-Foot Gardening.
Bartholomew’s method allowed us to enjoy reasonable crop production in a small space. With his technique, almost any homeowner can grow her own food.
The square-foot gardening concept is simple: Build a raised bed. Divide the space into sections of one square-foot each. Lastly, plant vegetables (and/or flowers) in just the amount of space they need.
The advantages of this system include reduced workload, less watering, easy weeding (and not much of it), and easy access to your crops. This is a great way to learn to grow some of your own food.
Back in the 1990s, Kris and I had raised beds similar to these (from Flickr user johnyaya).
We built our square-foot garden one Saturday in mid-April. I spent the morning constructing three raised beds out of two-by-sixes. Each bed was twelve feet long, four feet wide, and twelve inches tall. At the time, I most certainly was not a handyman, yet I was able to build these in just a few hours. It was fun.
Digging was less fun.
I spent the afternoon double-digging three patches in our lawn. We maneuvered the frames into place, leveled them, and then filled them with rich soil (purchased from a nearby nursery-supply center). Finally, we created a grid over each bed using tacks and twine. When we were finished, our raised beds looked like orderly grids.
After we built the raised beds and outlined the growing space, we followed the guidelines in Bartholomew’s book.
Vintage is so very in vogue. These women left their full-time jobs to remodel Airstreams. Their first client project is a 1976 Sovereign.
“Oh good,” Kim said when I rolled out of bed yesterday morning. “Iâm glad youâre up.” She gets up at 5:30 for work most days, but I tend to sleep in. Especially during allergy season.
“Huh?” I grunted. It was 6:10 and I was very groggy. My evening allergy meds kick my butt. Plus, I hadn’t had my coffee yet.
“Somethingâs wrong with the bathroom sink,” she said. “Look. Itâs leaking. The floor is soaked.” She wasn’t kidding. The bathmat was drenched. When I looked under the vanity, I was greeted by a small lake.
“Ugh,” I grunted. This wasn’t how I wanted to start my day.
Kim kissed me goodbye and hurried off to work. I pulled on a pair of pants, poured some coffee, pulled out the vanity drawers, and got to work.
I was worried that I might have caused the leak when I replaced the sink’s pop-up assembly last month, but no. The problem was obvious: The hot water line to the bidet (which I installed in October) had worked itself loose. (By the way, I love my bidet. Too much information, perhaps, but it’s some of the best sixty bucks I’ve ever spent.)
Fortunately, the fix was simple. I reattached everything, then added a light layer of tape to prevent similar problems in the future.
Note: As a safety measure — to make sure I wasn’t missing anything — I took photos of the issue and made a trip to the hardware store to ask their advice. They told me everything should be fine.
This might seem like a small thing to some folks but itâs a big deal in my world. You see, Iâve never really been a DIY type of guy. I used to get overwhelmed by home improvement. I felt unprepared, incompetent.
More and more, though, Iâm learning that I can do it myself. It just takes patience and perseverance. And the more projects I complete, the more confidence I gain.