Tag Archives: DIY

Wood Patio Table/Work Table DIY

20 Tuesday May 2014

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Our back patio is approximately 48 feet long by 12 feet wide. One end is open and the other end adjoins a wall. Having such a large patio is great on one hand because of the outdoor space it provides. On the other hand, however, that’s a long space to fill up! Our back door leads down onto the patio at about the halfway point. Being an entry way to the outdoor room the patio will eventually be, the steps will naturally bisect the space into two halves. Rather than trying to tie the entire long patio together like some sort of banquet hall, it seems natural to me to make two areas.

The grilling  and main dining area will be on the north, open ended side. The sitting, socializing, and sipping tea or cocktails side will be the southern end with the wall. I thought this a natural set up because aftah all, that’s what we do in the south, we sip sweet tea or cocktails and socialize. Actually, my real reason is that the grill should, of course, go on the open ended side of the patio so that the smoke can waft out and away from the patio, and go up the street to make my neighbors drool.

pationorthACK! Don’t look at the mess. This is why people never see pictures of the north end of the patio when I’m out there taking pictures of the pretty plants. This is the end with the big grey plastic monstrosity holding the pool tools and toys, the grill, and a table where we pot plants. Consider this the before picture and try to imagine an outdoor kitchen and dining area here instead of the current clutter.

patiosouthThis is the south side of the patio, with all the pretty plants, and Belle the barn dog who is currently being employed to keep the rabbits and squirrels from devouring the pretty plants. She’s a bit of a micro-manager when it comes to supervising the projects though. This area and the garage are being used as work spaces for our projects. This patio is closed due to construction

The southern end of the patio has that big blank beige wall, and a tiny door to the master bedroom in the corner. I have planned to build a seating area with two storage benches and two chairs, but I hadn’t decided what to do with the big blank wall. Briefly, I considered painting a mural. Then I remembered that I would have to live with whatever I painted. That caused a cringe. As I was surfing through decorating and DIY websites, I came across the use of mirrors outdoors.

Several years ago a friend gave me a large framed mirror that she could no longer use. I knew I could use it, I just didn’t know where to hang it so that it would reflect anything in my house that I wanted to see twice every time I came in the room. When I saw the patio mirrors on the internet, I knew just what to do with the big blank wall. I can’t just have a big mirror on the wall, so we’re building a small table that I can use to work on the patio projects. Once the patio projects are finished, I will paint the table and place it under the big mirror, and fill it with plants, candles, and whatever pretty stuff I think might be safe there.

patiotablejoiningWe decided on this simple project not only because it is functional and I needed a table, but also because we wanted to practice our pocket hole joinery technique before moving on to more complicated projects. We first pre-drilled all of the necessary pocket holes for the frame boards. After that, joining the pieces went faster than assembling any furniture I’ve ever bought in a box.

patiotableframeThe completed table frame is also much sturdier with our pocket holes than anything I’ve ever put together out of a box. The screws hold fast without using glue!

patiotableWe were going to use pocket holes to attach the table top and the only thing that stopped us, as usual, was that we didn’t have enough screws. Instead, we drilled in from the top to attach the boards. If this had been a project I planned to stain, I’d have probably waited and bought more screws, but because we’re leaving it unfinished to use as a work table and, in the end, will be painted, I’ll just fill the shallow holes around the screws before I sand and paint.

You can find the plans for this project, along with 30 more things to do with 2x4s here: http://www.morelikehome.net/2012/10/day-30-build-2×4-craft-table.html

 

My Mother’s Day DIY Tools As Much Fun as Candy

18 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in General Farm Stuff, Home and other Repairs, Rural life, Uncategorized, Wood Crafts

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I am not without tools, William saw to that. We have tools that I had when I was a single Mom, tools that William bought throughout his years of home ownership, and a lot of the tools his father had collected. We have hand saws, table saws, drills, sanders, grinders, a tile saw, drill press, a collection of screw drivers, hammers, and wrenches of all descriptions. We are not tool poor. There are quite a few power tools, however, that we have simply done without because we had the hand tools.

For Mothers Day this year, I made my sons shopping chores easy for them. I gave them a list of tools that would have made William’s home improvement life easier and will now make my DIY life and yard work easier.

kregjigThis Kreg Jig K4 kit has already allowed us to make headway on the arms and back for the swinging bed, and will make building the frame for the next planter boxes and storage bench much easier and neater. This kit is available at Home Depot, but Home Depot doesn’t carry any of the nifty clamps that make pocket hole work so easy. Lowes has a better selection of accessories and screws for this jig.

 

powerstaplerThis Chicago Power Stapler is great for all the projects I have planned which require upholstery. I used it to upholster the top for the storage bench and it drove the staples in straight and fast. No bent staples to remove! There is a trigger safety lock and the tool weighs less than 2 lbs. so it was easy for my old lady hands to use. This stapler came from our local Harbor Freight.

 

ryobipolesawUntil now, all we’ve had to trim the trees have been long pruning shears and a bow saw. We set this Ryobi Pole saw up and put it to work immediately. We trimmed every over grown mesquite tree in our yard into shape in about an hour and a half. Those were big trees and thick branches too! We’re using this saw to cut up the branches we removed. Some will go to DIY projects and some will go into the firepit to makes some splendidly flavored grilled meats. This was a tool I knew I could handle and it was a lot less scary to me than a chain saw. These are available at Home Depot

I love chocolate as much as any chocoholic Mom, but I’ll take tools that save the time and strength I don’t have over a Whitman’s Sampler any day!.

The Patio Storage Bench DIY from Billiam’s To-Do List

17 Saturday May 2014

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Work continues on the patio in fits and starts and something always seems to pop up as a road block to completion of projects. Tools break, we run out of screws (for my birthday I’m asking for at least two boxes of screws in every size known to hardware stores), we don’t have the right tool, a project has to be completely rethought (the hanging bed) and we don’t have the right lumber, we run out of time, high winds, other chores have to be done, boy you name it and it can, and will, get in the way of the fun patio projects. When working on a budget as tight as mine is, however, the problem that crops up most often is how to find less expensive alternatives to what we need.

We had started this storage bench two months ago. My son got the frame built, I sanded the reclaimed cabinet doors and, once they were attached to the frame, I painted the bench with one coat of yellow and one coat of green, re-sanded it all, then stained and then applied 3 coats of spar urethane. It was time to upholster the lid. That’s where the project ground to a halt.

storagebenchBecause this bench will be on the patio and exposed to the Arizona heat, sun, and desert dirt, I had to be careful what I used to upholster the lid to provide comfortable, attractive and functional seating. If you have an unlimited or at least a decent budget you can find outdoor upholstery materials, but my budget is such that I need to find seriously inexpensive or free materials. The project ground to a halt because foam sheets and fabric marketed for outdoor furniture use is too expensive for my close to zero budget.

After a good bit of research and a lucky insight provided by my son who makes ragtops for cars, I discovered much about foam and alternative upholstery fabrics. I learned that polyurethane foam is naturally mildew resistant and it is marketed for a number of uses. The uses it is marketed for seem to be the driving force behind the prices, even more so than the dimensions. I have discovered this phenomenon before when a 20 gallon plastic bucket at the feed store cost me almost 20.00 and I subsequently found the same type and size bucket at Lowes for 8.00. The only difference in the buckets were that one was marketed for use with pampered horses and one was marketed for use in household cleaning.

Armed with my new knowledge, I went to Walmart and found polyurethane foam bed toppers. They’re only an inch thick, they have a molded pattern on one side but are completely smooth on the other side. While the thickness and the molded pattern were unsuitable for my needs, the sheets of foam were the size of a full sized bed and only 11.00 each. I could work around the thickness problem and the pattern for that price! I walked out of the store with two of the full sized foam bed toppers. All I needed to find was the weather resistant fabric.

Enter my son who makes ragtops for cars at a local fabrication business. I was showing him the projects we had going and explained the problem with this bench when he told me of the properties of the canvas cloth used for convertible tops and sliding ragtops. The material is highly flexible, has to be extremely durable and it also, of course, can’t let water in to the interior of the cars. BINGO. The choice of colors is pretty limited, although I suspect you can find it online in almost any popular car color. The colors most often used, however, are black, tan and grey. Grey wouldn’t go well with the bench color and I am trying to move away from desert beige, so I chose the black. The fellows at the fabrication shop graciously donated a piece of their canvas cloth that was large enough to cover the bench top with enough left over to upholster a couple of ottomans.

benchupholstery1First, I cut the mattress toppers in half, then stacked three of those halves to make a 3 inch thick foam pad, with a smooth side facing up as well as smooth against the lid. Then I laid the lid on top and trimmed around the edges, leaving just enough overhang to prevent anyone feeling the edge of the plywood while seated. This doesn’t have to be a perfectly straight edge, just as near as you can manage. Once the fabric is pulled taught around it, the foam will, to a fair degree, conform.

benchupholstery2The next step was to lay down the fabric and measure to see how much I would need to cover the lid and the foam. You will want to pull the fabric taught on each edge before you mark your cuts and have a firm, unwrinkled cushion when done. Using a staple gun, staple the edges first and save the corners for last. Corners take a little patience but there are a lot of techniques on YouTube to help you manage them. You’ll need to make several pleats to get around the corner and make it look neat. The number of pleats/folds you’ll need to make on your corners depends mainly upon the type of fabric and how much of that fabric has gathered at the corners while stapling down the straight edges. Staple each pleat down until you have a nice tailored corner.

benchupholstery3Turn it all over and admire your handiwork!

benchupholstery4Take it outside and attach the hinges. An exacto knife to cut through the fabric under the holes of the hinges helps here so that the material doesn’t pull and get tangled in the screws. Just lay the hinges over the material where they will be attached and make a few slices in the holes with the point of the knife. Don’t sit there trying to cut out a perfect little hole, an X sliced through works just fine. Then, have a seat on your lovely, comfortable new bench. Enjoy a glass of tea and try to pretend that there are no other building materials junking up your patio chi. Congratulate yourself on ticking one more project off the list that will end when you have a beautiful and relaxing, junkless patio one day.

 

Surprise! It’s a Hanging Bed!

08 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Home and other Repairs, Uncategorized, Wood Crafts

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First I’ll show this picture of the bed and then I’ll tell you why this is not the hanging patio bed we originally planned. We will be putting the arms on this week and painting it when the winds die down.

surpriseproject4bedboxWhen we started this project, we had seen several articles about hanging patio beds, how to build them and even people selling them. Looking at the beds themselves, we knew this would be a big project and we’d have to figure out how to do many things, but we really wanted to give it a go. We had all the items we needed to build the bed from the freebie pallets to the Craig’s List wood pile and all we’d need to purchase would be the hardware. We thought. Remember in the blog post “Surprise Project 2: The Surprise is On Us” I mentioned not putting off something you know is going to be a problem later? Yeah, well, here is a picture of the problem we put off until after we put the 150 lb bed together.

surpriseproject4patioproblemoI saw this problem before we began and after seeing all of those handy dandy videos and tutorials, including one from Home Depot, I thought we could figure out a way to deal with it later. The problem is that those are simple 2 x 6s attached to the house with joist hangers. The outer edge of the patio is supported by 4 x 10 beams supported by large log columns. I knew we’d need to figure out a way to bolster the support system of the 2 x 6s but didn’t know how to add support to where the beams join the house. Turns out we couldn’t. After speaking with the very helpful and informative manager of the lumber department at our local Home Depot, we learned that our 6 to 12 pack a day builder had built our patio roof as if it were a simple addition and not the new construction that it was. He told us that most homes under construction have the patio roof firmly attached to the frame of the home and roof. Our guy, slapping up houses cheap and fast during the real estate boom of ’05, did not. Those beams you see up there are attached to nothing more than the fascia. The bed alone might have pulled the fascia down and putting people on the bed would have been calamity.

We considered plan B, which was to hang the bed in a two point system from the large, well supported beam at the outer edge of the patio seen below.  Our patio faces west. This is Arizona. During our 4 month season from hell, the patio can reach 130 degrees by the time the full sun hits it in the afternoons. So right from the get go I didn’t want to hang the bed right where the sun would hit it for 6 to 8 hours. I also didn’t feel the two point system attached to the main beam would allow it to swing in a stable manner. It seemed to me that this would cause a hammock effect and I didn’t want to get dumped onto the patio. Thirdly, our patio has three access points to the pool and back yard. The only way to hang the bed on that one beam would have blocked one of those access points.

surpriseproject4mainpatiobeamThis left us with Plan C., which was to build a very sturdy frame that would stand up to the swinging motion of the bed in four directions as well as 600-700 lbs of weight. Back to Home Depot we went, I’ve been there so many times per week now that even when I don’t need to go my truck has bypassed the grocery that was my intended target and wound up in the Home Depot parking lot. We waited to speak to the chief wood guru who was nice enough to help me decide which wood and size that would handle our load bearing issues. I cannot stress enough that newbies to DIY, like us, take the time to wait and ask the head honchos in each department for their advice. The two top guys in the lumber area at our local Home Depot have been invaluable. You may have to actually corner these guys because they are always busy, and you may have to use a little patience and tact if they hit you with a statement like “Unless I came to your house and looked I can’t tell you what would work…” or something to that effect. Simply ask something like “How can I describe this to help you visualize the problem”, be ready to draw pictures or even better, have photos on your cell phone handy to show, because we all know they are not coming to your house to look at the problem.

For the frame, we chose two 10 ft. 4 x 6 fir beams, one 8 ft. 2 x 6 fir beam, and four 8 ft 4 x 6s for the posts. We used 8 inch carriage bolts to attach the long beams to the posts, and four 3 inch screws to attach the 2 x 6s to the posts on each end of the frame. The 2 x 6s are non-weight bearing and are just there to provide the necessary stability for the back and forth motion of someone on the swing. We used four heavy duty 8″ eye bolts on the long beams and four heavy duty 6″ eye bolts on the bed frame. We set the posts so that there would be about 8 inches of swing room side to side to accomodate random jostling, and about the same back to front to quell the urge for excessive swinging. The bed still swings aplenty back to front, but we didn’t want anyone going crazy with it.

surpriseproject4frame

When setting the posts, we leveled each one every step of the way and leveled each long beam and side support. The 8′ posts are sunk 2 feet into the ground in cement, bringing the height of the frame to six feet tall. As there isn’t enough room to walk under the frame, due to the size of the bed, we felt this was sufficient because anyone taller than six feet would be in the process of sitting, seated, or snoozing and wouldn’t bonk their head. Our excessive leveling process really paid off because the bed swings true. We hung the bed two feet from the ground and used four feet of heavy duty chain on each corner.

We still need to add the arms and back and hope to incorporate some of the natural mesquite branch trimmings. I have a mattress topper on order and will be painting the bed and frame, but it’s already quite a lovely addition to the back yard and it’s been a real temptation to nap already.

Update: Finally got the mattress and linens for the bed. Here’s how it looks all dressed up!

hangingbeddressedupOf course, it’s the end of May and it’s 95 degrees in the shade at 10:00am, but I’ll be able to cozy up and enjoy it this evening, or maybe ’round midnight, for a week or two until it’s 95 degrees at midnight. This fall it will be glorious though!

 

Surprise DIY project 3

04 Sunday May 2014

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I suppose the suspense of waiting to find out more about this project does require a few posts just to keep it going. Unfortunately, when there’s been nothing to report, I can report nothing. It’s “spring” in the desert and I don’t have an enclosed work space for the wood projects. The wind has ground most projects to a complete halt.

Since our work is done in the garage or on the patio, anything requiring paint, stain or urethane is stacked up waiting for the wind to stop blowing half a ton of desert dirt and debris over everything. I have spent most days looking like one of the sand people from Star Wars, with my face mask, safety goggles, protective clothing and my iPod plugged into my ears and that’s just to feed hay to the ponies. The incessant roaring and buffeting of the wind blocked my ability to think of anything except the incessant roaring and buffeting of the wind, and made it impossible for us to do the thinking required to solve the problems we’ve faced on this project.

The wind has calmed, temporarily, for the past two days. Just long enough for me to figure out what we need to do to move ahead on the project again, get the materials, and get to work on Plan C.  Plan A had to be scrapped thanks to some less than professional work by the 12 pack a day builder. Plan B was scrapped because I couldn’t have lived with that alternative. Plan C., however, will not only solve the problems faced with the previous plans, but it has the added bonus of checking off another of the things on Billiam’s To-Do List.

Plan C. required digging through the hard packed, dry, rock filled desert dirt. Yesterday was our first 100 degree day of the year. We’re also pretty busy trying to get the house and property spruced up for an upcoming interview regarding my TankChair, Sherman. John was at work on the project while I ran around picking up everything blown about by the winds last week, pulled more weeds, and cleaned the swimming pool (in time for more winds to arrive this afternoon). We couldn’t use a post hole digger or even the pick axe to dig these holes because this area is home to the pipes for the leach field of the septic system.

johndiggingsurpriseprojectWe’d hoped to get an early start on the project yesterday morning. We were at Home Depot at 9:00am and thought we’d be home and working by 10.  Everything that could impede progress at the store, impeded our progress. A new pallet of the wood we needed had to be retrieved from the uppermost shelves, the fork lift ran out of gas before the driver was able to finish loading the wood stack onto the empty shelves and the tanks had to be switched out, a manager from another department came past, noticed the fork lift loaded with wood sitting there and felt compelled to harrass the fork lift driver for something clearly beyond his control (before I lost my cool and asked her to please get out of his butt long enough for me to get my wood and go home because I’d been waiting almost an hour already), and a line 6 customers deep in the lumber section that stayed 6 customers deep for 10 minutes before another line was opened. Our “quick trip” to Home Depot that should have taken 30 minutes, took three times that. I really must rant in another section about being in a manual wheelchair at Home Depot, or any crowded business, on a Saturday in another section, but suffice to say, those issues contributed to some pretty severe frustration by the time we were finally on our way to load the pickup, and were partly to blame for me losing my cool in the above mentioned event.

Here are the materials we will be using to execute Plan C.

plancmaterialssurpriseproject

I will be doing more house and yard chores in preparation for the TankChair interview, but hopefully we’ll get a little more done this evening and tomorrow to show. Once the interview has passed, and the next bout of winds have abated we’ll be able to pick up the pace again and get this thing completed!