10 Tips For Building An Outdoor Ping Pong Table Using Cement Board
If you’re thinking about building an outdoor ping pong table using cement board for the top to keep it weather resistant then I have some tips for you! We recently built an outdoor ping pong table and learned a thing or ten along the way that, so far, the collective genius of the internet has not addressed. We hope that our experience building an outdoor ping pong table using cement board will help your build go a little bit easier so that you can get to the fun part – playing ping pong – a little bit faster! By the way, if you’re wondering if the ball bounces well on…
DIY Pool Maintenance Tool Holder For Leaf Skimmers and Poles
Today, I’m sharing the DIY pool maintenance tool holder we made to store our leaf skimmers and telescoping poles during pool season. Pools are awesome but they also come with a lot of stuff to maintain them. All of those pool maintenance tools need a place to go that’s out of the way but also easily accessible. There are storage options you can buy to hold your leaf skimmer and other telescoping poles, but when you have a problem to solve and loads of scrap wood in your garage, a DIY solution is definitely happening. We made a rack out of wood that attaches to the pool fence that can…
Adding To Our Concrete Pool Deck Ourselves
Patience is not one of my virtues but I did wait almost 4 years for us to add a 5-ft x7-ft section to our concrete pool deck. Yes, we poured that concrete ourselves. I should rename this blog “Gluttons For Punishment.” Another suitable blog name would be “We Like To Save A Buck But Dang That Concrete Is Heavy.” Thankfully, Handy Husband has experience pouring concrete and I’m a decent assistant as long as I’m not required to lift more than a handful of 80-lb. bags of concrete. After that, it is possible that whining occurs. It’s ironic that Handy Husband ran a concrete line pump when we first got…
Old House Essential: Slower Cooker For Paint Removal
There are house essentials and then there are old house essentials. The essentials might look the same on each list but their purpose can differ vastly. On my list of old house essentials is a slow cooker – not for cooking but for removing paint from door hardware. If you own an old house or any home where someone became overzealous with a paintbrush then a slow cooker will be the MVP when it comes to restoring your door hardware back to its original shine. To make this very clear, I own two slow cookers and I do not confuse the two. One is for making tasty dinners and the…
When To Use A Paint Wash To Mimic The Look Of Stain
Let’s talk about when to use a paint wash (aka diluted paint) instead of stain to finish wood. Under the right circumstances, a brown paint wash can mimic the look of stain. There comes a time in every DIY project when things are not going well and you begin to regret the choices that led you to this point. It’s in this moment of profound clarity when you’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time and money on something that does not look good that you realize you could have bought it on Amazon for a tenth of the price and zero of the headaches. Now you have to decide whether…
A Modern Country Laundry Room For Our Colonial Farmhouse
If a modern country laundry room can be a thing, that’s what we created for our Colonial Farmhouse. The transformation of this modern country laundry room only took us 3 months, 13 days, and, oh fine…a while. It took us a good long while to finish. Either this project was more tedious than we originally anticipated or we actually found a life and hobbies outside of working on this house. Yeah…you’re not going to believe we have actual hobbies, so this project was probably just tedious…as all good projects are. Almost four years ago our laundry room looked like this. Sexy, wasn’t it? That photo was taken on the day…
3 Reasons Old Houses May Have Stones Between The Studs
If you own a really old house you might have discovered stones or bricks instead of insulation in between the studs in your walls. It begs the question why do old houses have stones between the studs? Someone went to an awful lot of trouble to install those stones or bricks there. They had to have had a decent reason to undertake that back-breaking work. There are 3 possible reasons that really old houses, particularly those built in the 1700s and 1800s, may have stones or bricks in between the studs in the walls. First, let me say that I am the owner of a home built in the eastern…
DIY Wood Cube Cord Holder
Today I’m going to show you my latest creation, a DIY Wood Cube Cord Holder, and how you can make one yourself. Cord management for all of our electronic devices seems like a universal problem we can all get behind. That’s a rarity in our world! I’ve been on a kick to contain, manage, and wrangle all the charging cords in our house. It’s a thankless job but someone has to do it. My laptop charging cord is particularly wily. If that cord wasn’t plugged into my laptop, it would slide right off the back of my desk. There are adhesive clips you can purchase to solve that problem but…
3 Ways To Label DIY Furniture
Have you ever thought about how to label DIY furniture? Or even if or why you should label DIY furniture? We’ve made DIY furniture for years but didn’t think about labeling it until a couple of years ago when we had an “oh no” moment. We own a wood-framed mirror that, according to family lore, was made by my husband’s grandpa. Everyone in the family knew it was made by him but no one in the family could remember when he made it, why he made it, who he made it for, etc. The story of this mirror is now lost and that’s sad from a family history perspective. If…
New Bench For The Sunporch
We have a new bench for the sunporch. Yes, it’s a DIY bench because those are our favorite kind. We do not have a shortage of benches in this house. Including the new bench for the sunporch, we now have six benches. All but one of them have been DIYed either fully or partially. I guess we like benches. Why did we need a bench for the sunporch in particular? There should be an obvious answer to that question. However, the new bench is not for sitting. At least, not right now. The bench is for the plants. I needed an elevated surface to get some of the plants off…
