I’m back with the second installment of building in our fridge. Part 1 was all about the prep work that needed to be done for this project to fix the trim and ready the wall. Now we can get to the building of the actual cabinet and the four ways to customize a fridge that catapulted this project to the next level. There are a million tutorials of how to build a surround or cabinet for your refrigerator. Most of them claim to be “easy.” They may very well be. But that’s not how we do things. Below is the refrigerator that’s getting a glow up as seen in all…

When we purchased our home, it came with a perfectly functional older refrigerator in an off-white color. I’m so glad we didn’t replace it because now we have the opportunity to hone our DIY skills while in building in our fridge. Adding a cabinet around a refrigerator so that it looks built-in is not a novel concept. It’s been done millions of times, so this should not require a multipart blog series. But have you met our house? It is the “hold my beer” of houses whenever we want to do something simple and basic like building in our fridge. This house gives us a run for our money and…

If you have broken concrete by your garage door or somewhere in your garage, congratulations. You’re part of a club no one wants to be a member of. The good news is the dues for this club are not as high as you might think. In other words, broken concrete by a garage door is easily fixable. Plus, you don’t need a bunch of expensive tools or know-how to do it. That will all help, for sure, but you don’t need them. You will need the following: mason mix* Portland cement* water bucket small brush a small disposable container (soup can size is perfect) scrap wood or yardstick, if a…

Welcome to our European-inspired home gym in the middle of rural New Jersey. Are you more surprised that a home gym can be European-inspired or that part of New Jersey is rural? New Jersey is used to being the subject of many jokes, but this home gym we created is no joke. It’s our new favorite place! We converted a room in our 250-year-old Carriage House into a European-inspired home gym because that made the most sense, right now, for how we could utilize this space. It started out looking like this. Then we made it look worse when we decided the stone walls needed repointing because no one wants…

I love when old pieces of furniture have a backstory and this reclaimed wood bench we just made has the neatest origin story. The benchtop came out of a 250-year-old carriage house where it had been a windowsill for possibly centuries. A windowsill! Whoever thought a windowsill would have the starring role in a reclaimed bench story? It wasn’t on my bingo card, that’s for sure. Did you notice that I used the words “possibly centuries” to describe how old the windowsill was? Gold stars for paying attention. It’s tricky to put an exact date on lumber in this situation. I do have a few clues. According to our local…

It took five solid weeks of near daily work to complete one portion of our stone Carriage House restoration. All of that work was done on the walls. We didn’t even touch the floor besides cleaning it up. Five weeks to redo four walls. That’s some messed up math. I think it’s way past time for the grand reveal. Here’s a photo taken approximately 30 minutes into the restoration. To be fair, it looks more like destruction than restoration. It has to get worse before it gets better. You can see the potential, right? No? Well, I don’t blame you. This was definitely a squint and “trust the process” kind…