DIY Life

I used to be under the misapprehension that birds always nest in the branches of trees. How wrong I was! Since becoming interested in backyard birdwatching, I've learned that a great many bird species, including woodpeckers (like the red-bellied woodpecker pictured here) and wrens, nest in the cavities of dead or dying trees. Problem is: most people cut those trees down to make their yards look nice and tidy. What's a bird to do?

If you have a dead tree in your yard, consider leaving it standing. If not, but you still want to encourage wildlife, how about making a DIY nesting box? It's pretty easy even for the beginner woodworker because precision is not necessary. In fact, birds prefer the rustic look!

In Gary's post about increasing your homes sale value he recommends making sure that your floors are clean. He stresses the good impression this creates, and I totally agree. It doesn't matter if you're gearing up for a sale, or looking to better enjoy the space you have, refinishing your hardwood floors is a fabulous way to being a little luxury to your room.

Finishing or re-finishing a hardwood floor isn't the daunting task you might think. With some careful planning and diligent attention to detail you could take on this DIY refinishing project. There are important details in each step so be sure to check out the site for full instructions. Here's a summary of the steps:

Have you been wanting your own display cases, but they just cost way too darn much? Well, you're in luck. Go on down to your local liquor store or wine shop and kindly ask them for their wine crates. Since they generally throw them out, they should be happy to give them to you.

Curbly.com writer erinloechner has written an excellent article on how to make your own wine crate display. All you have to do is get your wine crates, pick up some gift wrap paper at the dollar store, make a trip to your local hardware store for some hanging hardware, spray adhesive, and some rubber bumpers, and you will be able to make some killer looking display cases for this weekend's project.

In my opinion, you could use some fabric scraps you have lying around your house and spray adhesive onto those before putting into the crate. I believe the display case would look just as nice. Now sit back with a nice bottle of wine, admire your handiwork, and call it another A+ project completed.

Anyone who's ever been in the unfortunate position of having to plan a funeral knows that funerals are shockingly expensive, and that the coffin itself can be a large part of the cost. But if your wood shop skills are decent, it's totally possible to build your own coffin, to be used when necessary (even if "when necessary" means "at your next Halloween party").

Aside from that, there are some people out there -- who know who they are -- who think that coffins make smashing home decor. This kind of undertaking would be perfect for them as well. I realize that some of our readers will find this morbid: sorry about that. (Sunshine and kittens to resume soon!) Everyone else will find more details after the break.

If you've had the same workbench for years, it's probably well used, and ready for replacement. It can be hard to decide what you need, and even harder to justify a big price tag. Ultimately, you want something sturdy and inexpensive. If that appeals to you, then try making your own for about $20.

Here are the plans for a simple workbench. It looks quite simple, and you might even have some of the materials on hand, reducing your cost even further. Here are the tools and materials that are listed for this project:

In case my blog title leaves some people a little confused, now is a good time to consider building and placing bat houses for our insect eating, night flying friends. Bat houses are very simple in design.

All bats need is an inverted enclosure with places inside where they can grasp with their little feet to hang upside down for some down time (or is that upside down time?) In any case, bats need places to roost and you can help to make it easy for them to find a home. Use this as an opportunity to teach your kids about the true value of bats.

When my father hears, "Woodworking project," he comes a-running, so I am lucky to have all the soap molds a girl could ever ask for. But if you love to make cold processed soaps and haven't figured out a good mold, you may want to try to build one yourself.

North Country Mercantile posts their ideas for making wooden soap molds, which are very similar to the ones my dad makes for me.

Need more details than North Mercantile gives? Try the directions for a Mitre Box soap mold at About, or RJ's instructions for making wooden soap molds.

The best thing about making your own molds? You can make them any size you'd like, based on the size bars you'd like to produce. North Country lines theirs with plastic wrap, I use plastic grocery bags (reduce, reuse, recycle, don't you know) but either one will keep your soap from sticking to the wooden mold.

For a small investment in lumber, you'll reap huge rewards when you use your completely customized wooden soap molds, made by you.

While this is certainly a very easy DIY project, I beg of you, please don't do it. But if you do, please send us a photo so we can all point and laugh.

The project in question is, as you've probably guessed from the picture, creating a wooden spoiler for your car.

Now, not all wooden spoilers are bad. (Okay, stay with me here!) Years ago my dad raced sports racing cars, and he had one in particular that was very difficult to handle. Before shelling out for a wing, he decided to fabricate one out of plywood to see if it would make a difference. It made a huge difference, and he ended up being quite a bit faster with it. So much so, that he never did replace the plywood version with a real wing.

If you've got an idea that needs some advanced manufacturing techniques, Ponoko might be just what you've been looking for. This wine rack is a nice sample of what they can do. Each piece is cut by a powerful laser, and shipped flat. On arrival, you assemble it - just like one of those wooden dinosaur models.

For now, they're offering custom laser cutting for your product. If you want to get started, grab their download their making guide. To create your design, you'll need some vector graphics software like Adobe Illustrator. You'll need to create a login, but then you'll have to wait a while - the site is getting so much traffic that the login page reports that it's too busy to me in... yet.

For do it yourself building projects there are basically just two types of clear plastic panels we tend to think about. Clear sheet acrylic, generally known of as plexiglas is thought of for its flexibility and workability. Polycarbonate, such as GE Lexan is more often the choice for projects which require a greater degree of impact resistance. Either type can be used for windows or other exterior applications but be aware that polycarbonate seems to maintain its clarity after long term exposure to UV better than plexiglas does.

If your source for clear plastic sheeting doesn't cut the material to your needed size and sell it that way, that means you will need to size the material for your project when you get home. The simplest way to get clean straight cuts in either material is on a table saw using a 60 tooth or greater, triple chip carbide blade. Be sure to wear appropriate personal protection and feed the material slowly and steadily through the saw.

Thinner rigid plastic sheeting can be sized by scoring deeply with a sharp blade. Make repeated passes along a metal straight edge to ensure a deep score line on both sides of the material. Just scoring on one side will not produce a nice clean break. After scoring the material, place it so the score line is at the edge of a table or work bench and trap the sheet by holding it down with a piece of lumber along the score line. Then simply apply firm downward pressure to snap the material right along your score line. If you'd like to you can easily smooth your newly cut edge with a little fine grit sand paper or emery cloth.

Do you know the American Girls? They're a family of dolls and related products. Each doll is a character created to represent a particular era in America's past, or a special girl from the present, and each doll has a set of meticulously detailed historical clothing, furniture, and accessories (not to mention books and movies) that you can buy. The 18" dolls have been a kiddie status symbol for the last two decades, so much so that Mattel eventually bought the entire concept from its original producer, Pleasant Company.

The thing is, American Girl stuff can get expensive. Some parents deal with this by buying genuine dolls, but picking up the accessories on eBay. Others buy everything the line has to offer, and still others buy similar, less-expensive dolls from stores like Target. The storage trunks for the American Girl dolls, sized to hold their beds and accessories and styled like a clothes chest from each doll's era, are some of the priciest items in the line, and may be the least interesting to kids who aren't completists. They mostly run between $159 and $175.

Instructables user WilyHacker has a solution to the storage trunk issue: why not build your own? From a common purchased white melamine storage cabinet, they have created a very viable unit for American Girls and similar dolls, perfectly sized to hold all of their furniture and accessories. Aside from the cabinet itself, you'll need some findings and a few power tools. If you don't have all the tools, you could have a lumber yard make any cuts you need, and maybe skip the step with a router and use L-brackets, painted white, to hold up the vertical divider.

Why would you want to build one? Well, maybe the name-brand storage trunk is way out of your budget, maybe it doesn't fit into the look of your kid's room, or maybe you'd rather spend the money on more accessories for the doll belonging to your own little American Girl. Any way you look at it, this is one sweet project.

Until recently, in terms of science fiction fandom, one of the most uncool things you could possibly be was a Doctor Who fan. Fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, old-school Battlestar Galactica: anyone could mock the Whovians.

So when the original BBC series was cancelled in the early 1990s after a run of several decades, it seemed like the fandom was destined to spiral down into gentle obscurity. The show's low-budget campiness had become a cliché: if you wanted to say that you'd seen something with poor special effects, all you had to do was suggest that it was "like Doctor Who," as though Doctor Who was a synonym for "something by Ed Wood." Sad words for a show that once was, for its first generation of young British fans, something so suspenseful, imaginative, and sometimes frightening that it had to be watched "from behind the sofa."

Much as geekiness in general has become cool in the last decade, Doctor Who is no longer quite the locus of mockery that it once was. A revamped version of the series began to air in the UK in 2005, to great popularity and acclaim, re-energizing the fandom. It currently stars David Tennant as the alien Time Lord who regenerates into a new form in situations that would kill a mortal human, and who travels through time and space in a ship called the TARDIS that resembles an outdated style of London police call box. (The third season of the revamped version is currently airing in the US on the SciFi Network; the second season will be re-aired on BBC America starting this weekend, as will the spin-off series, Torchwood.)

Anything popular enough to have a large online fandom seems to spawn crafts at the speed of light, and Doctor Who has been no exception. The most iconic item is a series of long, colorful scarves worn by the Fourth Doctor in the late 1970s, which we'll delve into after the break. But that's the tip of an iceberg that also includes a number of projects related to the TARDIS (yes, this article is also bigger on the inside than on the outside), and to the Doctor's most famous enemies, the infamously pepper-pot-like Daleks. Ever wanted to eat a Dalek? Well, you'll learn more about that after the break, too... and it won't taste like pepper at all.

Recently, a lot of media attention has been given to various ways to increase storage space in a house. Wendy A. Jordan's book Making Room posits many possible examples, though most of them seem to come down to "knock out some drywall between beams and build shelving there" or "make the area under your stairs into a cabinet/closet/office/etc." This definitely won't work at my house, where the area under the stairs is the upper half of the stairwell that leads to the basement! No, we have to line the walls with shelving and hope for the best.

One of the coolest "increased storage" areas I've seen is in the family home of one of my friends, where there are two secret rooms. One isn't so much secret as "easy to miss" (it's a tiny room accessed from inside the garage), but the other is behind a bookcase. To get to it, you have to unload and move the entire bookcase, and he's always claimed it's "not that cool," but still: secret rooooooooom!

Now you, too, can have a secret room, by following this tutorial at WikiHow for a Hidden Door Bookshelf. You'll have a wall of useful shelving, and one of the units will hide a door! You're probably only going to keep all your valuables in your new hidden room, but it's so completely awesome that it's worth building anyway. (And that's a good thing: because you have to build a steel frame, it's a relatively complex project, definitely not for novices.)

Bonus: unlike my friend's hidden-room-bookshelf, it's built on a pivot, so you won't have to take everything off of it to get into the room itself.

[via Shelterrific.]

If you are a skilled chess or checkers player than you are probably careful and thorough enough to master this project. Or, maybe you are a hobby woodworker and your planning that perfect gift for a chess loving friend. Whatever the case, if you are looking to build an heirloom quality all-wood chess or checker board than this tutorial is all you'll need. Alex Franke walks you through step by step with loads of tips and pictures along the way.

This is not a hack, but a real piece of art, and you'd never guess by looking at the board that it could have been pulled together with quality scraps of leftover wood. If anybody tries this project, let us know how it goes.

Yesterday, I wrote about a great website that will help you figure out which glue is the best one you can use for a particular job. In the comments, a reader associated with home expert Danny Lipford's site noted that they'd also just posted a useful guide to glue, and because our readers are awesome, I thought the article deserved its own post.

Jerri Farris's article isn't a substitute for ThisToThat.com, and it doesn't really cover glues that would be used for most craft projects, only those you're likely to use in home construction and improvement. It doesn't go into great detail about the differences between specific brands of glue, either, or the differences in the chemical compositions of some of the glues it discusses. ("Instant Glue" may be a retail category and general name, but last time I checked, its formal name was cyanoacrylate glue. It's an acrylic resin. Leaving out this info makes an article user-friendly, but disappoints us geeky types.)

However, if you've ever wondered about the difference between two-part epoxy and contact cement, or where it might be appropriate to use Gorilla Glue, Farris's article is a helpful read. You'll learn to take care of your glue supply, and you'll never again try to use wood glue where you should be using Liquid Nails.