DIY Stone Bathmat: Create a Luxurious Shower Experience It is a sensation we associate with luxury resorts and remote beaches – stepping out of the water and onto smooth pebbles. It is also remarkably easy to recreate this experience at home. Susan Wasinger from Natural Home (via LifeHacker) spells out the simple steps and materials, but essentially: (1) make the frame, (2) add a wire mesh screen, (3) add the stones. And voila, a free foot massage every day. The tools are elementary as well: a basic saw, pliers, screws and glue will do. Details can be found here, but think of this as a fun project worth adapting – not something to strictly follow the rules on, particularly when it comes to the constituent materials: “The stones can be collected in your beach-combing adventures or purchased by the bag at garden centers and stone yards for a couple bucks a pound.”
Spicy Storage Solution Frees Up Stacks of Cupboard Space People who do more than a casual amount of cooking are bound to have cupboards full of spice jars. There are plenty of store-bought solutions for organizing and arranging those jars, but it seems that a vertical storage method is the most space-saving of all. This DIY version was created using a sheet of stainless steel, some canning jars with one-piece caps, epoxy glue and super-strong magnets – all for a little over $100. The wall-mounted spice rack is perfect for holding the seemingly endless collection of spice bottles that build up so easily in the kitchen. As with any DIY idea, the key is to make it yours. 3 Lovely Ways to Upcycle Glass & Plastic Bottles into Vases Generic disposable containers take on new dimensions with a simple twist or touch of decoration. These three solutions show how a little extra time or material can go a long way. Take the essentially two-dimensional Pimavera Vase, for instance – simply drop in your old bottle and voila, you have a neat receptacle for a single perfect flower. Cover It does what the title suggests: a net sheath slips around the outside of the container, conforming to it but also transforming it. The Lace Vase extends the same principle upward, combining a flexible silicon rubber sleeve that snugly hugs the top of the container while opening the neck upward to turn an inwardly-tapered bottle into an outwardly-expanding vase.
Practical to Impossible: 50 DIY Projects, Designs & Ideas For a little summer fun, you could use IKEA-style plans to construct your own time-and-space-ship or turning your computer cables into wall art. Alternatively, you might turn your pursuits to something a tad more practical, like creating an instant laptop case from an old hooded sweatshirt or making old books into new planters. Click the image links below for more pictures of and information on each design or idea: Either way, there is sure to be something in this collection of fifty do-it-yourself projects, ideas and concepts to tickle your fancy. Some of these project concepts come with pragmatic plans and material lists, while others are intended to spark your imagination.
Just Undo It: Re-Folding Clothes into DIY Bags & Backpacks Any do-it-yourself idea should get bonus points for not requiring any fasteners, hardware or other accessories to work – and extra credit for utilizing just one object, particularly something nearly everyone has a spare of in their closet. The video says it all, without requiring more than 20 seconds (let alone anything by way of words) – how to just flip, fold and wrap your way to a temporary laptop-to-go bag that even your precious computer should feel nice and secure inside. But why stop there? ConceptualDevices likes to keep things nice and easy, playing with elemental videos and simple sketches to show very clear new ways to organize existing objects and data into nifty new formations.?
Make Do: 3 Modular Pieces for Making Endless DIY Projects One of the problems with a kit-of-parts approach is that you need, well, the kit … of parts. But what if you started from another angle and treated everyday scraps as raw materials? Then you might arrive at this ingenious idea: create the connectors and let the world around provide the rest of your material palette. MakeDo is a neat product that enables the do-it-yourself process with a set of items to help parse apart and reassemble everything from cardboard to plastic and fabric. Though it clearly has child-friendly appeal, calling it a kid’s toy would not do justice to this clever system – these would be equally fun to set loose in an otherwise boring lobby, waiting room or creative corporate office. The three basic modular elements are a connector, a hinge and construction tool. Bubble wrap, cardboard tubes, coffee cups, egg cartons, shipping boxes and other everyday objects suddenly take on a new set of possibilities – from playful to profound.
Paper-Back Planters: Recycling Books to Pot Indoor Plants Have books finally met their match with the Apple iPad, or is it just another fad like the Amazon Kindle? Readers may find some poetry in these volumes regardless of whether they are willing to give up their favorite paperback companions: potted plants put into scooped-out sections of beautiful old hardback books. Gardenkultur (via Inhabitat) makes a simple recycling project out of even the most complex novels, but carving into the heart of a book, sealing off the resulting space and putting seeds of little trees or other plant life into the curved void. Of course, this would work just as well as a do-it-yourself gardening project for those green-thumbed enough to provide proper moisture barriers for their own plants. But if a picture is said to be worth one thousand, at how many words do we value a wee plant? Hopefully these books were beyond repair and those ripe only for reuse.
Carpenter Bees: How to Get Rid of Them With This DIY Trap! | Living Small Order the Bee Trap HERE!! My cabin is cursed with carpenter (wood boring) bees this time of the year. They buzz around trying to pretend that they are harmless bumblebees, hoping I won’t notice that they are eating holes in my cabin’s woodwork, in my porch swing, in the hand-made trim from my father. Grrrrr! I don’t like using pesticides on the farm and my other methods (see the bottom of this post for those gory details) didn’t work well. So, Pops built me some traps to get rid of the little suckers and I thought my readers might be interested in how to build wood bee traps to eliminate carpenter bees. Below are step-by-step instructions with lots of photos to make it easy for you to make your own anti-bee box — and they WORK! How To Build A Carpenter Bee Trap Gather the following items: First, cut four pieces of 1×4 the same length (about 10 inches long) and screw them together like this: Cut a scrap of plywood (see photo above) so it overhangs all four sides of the box. TA-DAAAAAA! YESSSS!
BarkEater Follies: DIY - Standup Paddleboards (SUP) Part 1: how to build your own paddle board Author's note: To really learn how to build a SUP, spend a few days on Swaylocks, Surfer Steve's, Standupzone and other Internet sites. I spent a few weeks doing that. The following is just my build, presented for what it was. The girls have decided to become professional standup paddleboard racers. When they wanted to learn violin - $100 bought the starter violin, which may have seen 20 hours of use and practice. Paddleboards, however, cost like $1,000. Hey, if I can make a SUP paddle, I can make a SUP board, right? Step 1: meet a really nice guy who gives you a perfect CAD model of a cutting edge race boat design, scaled down to the specific weight of the kids. Step 2: research materials and building processes on swaylocks.com and surfersteve.com. Step 3: Buy materials. HighLoad EPS foam insulation. Step 4: create templates. Step 5: Glue up foam. Glued up foam, covered with lumber during glue curing: Step 6: Build shaping stands. Step 9: Place side profile form on side of board.
Holzer Style Log Bee Hive (Sepp Holzer forum at permies) Sepp has given a couple of great lessons on bees. As for colony collapse disorder, he says that this is not a disease of the bees, but rather a disease in the minds of man, and how they manage their hives. Many beekeepers keep bees in hives with plastic frames, rob their honey at the wrong time, fill their environment with toxins, truck them all over the country for pollination contracts, and are then mystified as to why they are all dying. Sepp has talked about log hives, and straw hives. The first step for the log hive is to find a log with a solid exterior and a rotten middle. Use a chainsaw to hollow out the rest of the log to the proper wall thickness, which correlates to how cold the winters are in your area. Next mark the spots for the top bars, and cut out the notches with a chisel. This is what it should look like mostly finished. This is what a finished nice one looks like, with a spiffy window for observation, and full of bees!
Turn Soda Cans Into Aluminum Roofing Shingles! Here's one way to take good old coke cans and turn them into non-rusting aluminum roofing shingles. It's a bit time consuming, but have you priced aluminum shingles lately? Other Great Stories From Offgridquest.com: Turn your plastic bottles into rope! Here is a cool way to turn your plastic bottles into rope / twine! The first Video shows how to make a really effective cutter. The second video shows a how-to make a cutter quickly and easily! What kind of amazing ideas can you come up with to use your bottle rope for? A Hammock? Other Great Stories From Offgridquest.com:
Make Your Own Droplet Microscope Lens for a Penny Clear liquid droplets can bend light, acting like a lens. By exploiting this well-known phenomenon, scientists have devised a cheap and simple way to turn a smartphone into a high-resolution microscope. The high-powered lenses cost less than a cent apiece to make, and all you need is a cover slip or glass slide, some common polymer, and an oven. The method would be immensely helpful for diagnosing medical conditions in remote areas and developing countries. Conventional lenses are usually made in one of two ways. You can grind and polish a flat disk of glass into a particular curved shape, or you can pour gel into molds. By adding small amounts of fluid to the droplet successively after baking the base drop, they managed to reach a (surprisingly high) magnifying power of 160 times with an imaging resolution of four micrometers. "What I did was to systematically fine-tune the curvature that's formed by a simple droplet with the help of gravity, and without any molds," Lee explains. 1.