Ideas

Lighting Tips for Photographing your DIY Projects

In my previous article a little while back – 5 Reasons to Photograph Your DIY Projects – I suggested several good reasons why you should take progress photos at various stages of your home reno or woodworking projects. Now I’ll share a few simple photography lighting tips that will help you end up with better [...]

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Cat Tree Plans and Ideas

Our four-legged family members have become an integral part of our lives and we’ll do almost anything to make them happy. And by “them” of course, I really mean “us”. Here’s a statistic that will blow your mind. In 2011, in the worst economy in decades, US households spent $50.96 billion on their pets. Of [...]

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5 Reasons to Photograph Your DIY Project

Odds are most of you reading this article either have a digital camera or a cell phone that can take pictures – maybe both. This is the new reality that allows us to document our lives in ways we never would have 10 or 20 years ago. We get instant results on colour displays that [...]

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Big Red Barn Dance – Part 3

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for… Today, Lee & Katelynn show off the beautiful results of all their hard work and creative use of “treasures” in the conclusion of this 3-part series. You can catch up on the back story here in Part 1. Enjoy! – Rick Decorating to suit the venue With [...]

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Big Red Barn Dance – Part 2

If you’re just tuning in, Lee & Katelynn, a couple of young engineers, took on the challenge of holding their wedding reception in a barn filled with 50 years of accumulated “stuff”. You can catch up on the story here in Part 1. Today, Lee gets into the nitty gritty of whitewashing the barn interior [...]

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Big Red Barn Dance – Part 1

As I mentioned in my Stonehaven Life 2012 Preview, Lee & Katelynn, a couple of young and energetic engineers, took on a mission last year that some of us (like me, and apparently Lee’s father) would have likely dismissed as “crazy”. Today, Lee lays the groundwork of how they transformed a junk-filled barn into a [...]

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Stonehaven Life 2012 Preview

Well, now that we’ve polished off the last of the turkey and we’re scrounging around in the bottom layer of holiday chocolates, it’s time to contemplate the year ahead. 2011 was hectic for some of us and a relentless economic challenge for many others. We were "#Occupied" and pre-occupied by an unprecedented wave of protests, [...]

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Bonus Bathtub Shelf

When we renovated our bathroom recently, it included moving the tub to increase the headroom under a sloped ceiling. Since were we using the same length of bathtub, we had to deal with the space left at the end of the tub. Rather than just fill the whole thing in, we decided to use the [...]

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Revamp a Chair with Leather Belts

I can really get behind re-purposing and recycling stuff that might otherwise end up getting tossed away. I’m also a big fan of creative design ideas that keep us from getting too set in our ways and falling into the “that’s the way we always do it” trap. Rachael Ranney, host of {Re}habitat on Buildipedia’s [...]

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MDF Baseboard Radiator Cover

This project idea is the result of a recent bathroom reno. The old steel shroud on our baseboard radiator had to come off to get the plaster, lath and wood shavings out of the wall behind it. If you’ve taken one of these out before, you know it involves cutting things apart. Damage aside, it [...]