Community Brag Posts

My kiddos LOVE this clubhouse. We use it in the playroom, but also could be an extra bed.

I have always wanted a fireplace, however I couldn't justify spending $600 or more for a flimsy electric TV stand. Not to mention, I have checked out the displays of these pieces at Lowes, and they are made from cheap materials that I do not want to sit my expensive TV on. We found the entertainment center on Craigslist for $100, because they got rid of their big projection screen TV (which many are doing these days). I looked for fireplace TV stands for months, and just couldn't find a piece that wouldn't look like a separate piece of furniture stuck in the middle. I found a new electric insert on Criagslist for $100 (normally about $250), and purchased the materials from Lowes where a nice employee cut it all for me. I glued and nailed the frame together, applied the AirStone, attached the mantle (a 2x4), and slid the insert into place. Overall, the project took about 4 hours to complete, and cost about $200 to build. (It could have been done for a bit cheaper, but I went with 3/4" plywood for strength and stability.)

Built this for our dining room. Added two feet to the length. Neighbors started talking and now I've been commisioned to build a table and bench!

Turned leg coffee table from pine.  I also built matching end tables (shown in another post).  :)

I build these from the plan for Heavy Duty Sawhorses. I preferred these for the thickness to match my butcher block desktop. 

Our daughter asked for a kitchen island so my first stop was Ana's website to see what plans I could find. I built the base while my husband was out of town one week. This was a zero trip to Lowe's project as I raided our wood rack and scrap bins. My husband came home and built the countertop.

Fun to build altered the doll plan a bit with a spare peice of plywood to match the toddler bed better.

I love working from these plans! 

I redid a very old church pew fro one of my friends. It's origins is from one of the original churches in our home town. (There was SO much lacquer on it) This church pew was in bad shape, I had to take it totally apart and re-glue and pocket hole jig every wooden piece together because it was falling apart.

This project was born out of desperation for some way to organize our garage. It is not difficult to build, and it went pretty quickly with two of us. It probably didn't take more than four hours tops for each section. I've seen the prices for garage storage components and some of them are staggering! We have removed a tall chrome shelf, and moved a ton of stuff onto these shelves, creating a hundred square feet of floor space! And for only $25! Come on over and check it out on my blog! Val

We couldn't find a mid-height, double loft bed for our daughter that we liked that wasn't ridiculously expensive, so we decided to build one ourselves! I found some awesome plans on this website and played around with a few until I created exactly what we wanted. I mostly used the Full Size Farmhouse Bed plan but also used some aspects from the loft bed plan for the guardrails and the bottom rails. Then we went out and bought the wood and started building! This is really the first thing that I have ever built (my husband has never built anything either) and it turned out so well. I think it is gorgeous and I am so proud of it! This is my first brag post so forgive me if I am doing it wrong! Lots of instructions on how I built it below, so scroll down if you just want to see the pictures.

I used Google Sketch-Up to build the bed first and to tweak the plans. Below I will explain some of the changes that I made.

- I actually did not trim anything off of the ends of the head board or foot board as shown in the Full sized bed plans. I just built the bed to be as wide as 8 x 1x8s and adjusted the plan accordingly. I figured that if I had to climb up there to change the sheets, the extra room around the mattress would be appreciated. The 1x8s that I used were 7 1/4" wide.

- I bolted a 2x4 to the 4x4 posts right under the foot board and headboard panels for the side rail supports to sit on. I wanted it to be extra strong as the bed was going to be up high and I figured the bed would take a lot of abuse from the kids.

- The siderails were made from a 2x10 glued and screwed to a 2x4. The 2x4 sits on top of the 2x4s at the bottom of the headboard and footboard panels and is screwed into the 4x4 posts. The 2x10s are also screwed into the 4x4 posts.

- Since the mattress would be sitting up higher on the headboard and footboard than in the original plans, I added 3" to the length of the 1x8s used in the panels.

- I had planned to make a slatted base out of 1x4s to support the mattress so I also placed 2 x 2x4s on edge lengthwise down the middle of the bed to support the slats. Those 2x4s are also supported on top of the 2x4s at the bottom of the head and foot boards. The inexpensive 1x4s here are very rough on the one side which I did not want touching the mattress or for the kids to get splinters from while playing under the bed. The nice ones were super expensive at around $18 for a 14' board. It turned out to be less expensive and much less work to buy a queen sized slatted bed base from the big Blue and Yellow inexpensive furniture store here and trim the ends of the boards to length with my mitre saw. n even bigger bonus is that the wood is already finished and didn't require anything further than screwing it down to the supports.

- I made the height of the area under the bed 45" (just tall enough for DD to stand under for now) and adjusted the length of the 4x4 posts accordingly.

- I assembled the bed into different large pieces before bringing it inside. The headboard and footboard are 2 solid sections that cannot be taken apart. The side pieces are made to be able to come off if we ever need to move the bed.

- I couldn't find any really good instructions anywhere on how to build a ladder or to change ladder plans to suit our needs so I built it after the bed was built. I found it easier to envision this way and to figure out the angles. I build the ladder out of 2x3s.

I have the Google Sketch-Up plans for the bed (minus the ladder) if anyone is interested, but as I said before, I am not an experienced builder so I do not think I should post them here. Maybe someone can use them as a base to create their own plan with though. I found Sketch-up to be a very valuable tool as I actually "built" the bed virtually before ever touching the wood. It helped me figure out what order to put things together in and also allowed me to perfect my design before making any cuts. It still took many trips to and discussions with people at my local Orange store to figure out what kind of fasteners to use and where to use each type. I brought printouts of my plans so that they would be able to help me better.

A couple of finishing touches that I did:

- I sewed some pretty curtains and hung them from aircraft cable and eye hooks under the bed.

- The back of her dresser was exposed under the bed and did not look very nice so I created a magnetic wall by screwing some inexpensive metal sheets meant for ducts to the back of it. I have temporarily covered all of the exposed edges with pink patterned duct tape but plan to trim it out at some point.

Hope you like it!

I have tried all sorts of nest boxes. No one ever used them. I decided to make the one from Anna White's site. I used joinery to attach the various pieces. The best thing of all: I find girls sitting in the boxes and take eggs from them. It really is awesome. I got a photo with real eggs and you can also see the wooden eggs to entice them to try it out. Thank you so much! I will build another one for the other side of the the wall.

I modified Sausha's design, taking out the bottom shelf, adding a back brace, and putting fascia boards on. I also put in a 2x4 between the underframe and each back leg at a forty-five degree angle as braces. My legs are a bit different too. I used three 2x4's. The first leg piece goes from the plywood top to the ground. I put four screws between it and the frame. Then I took two 2x4's and placed them butted at a ninety degree angle around it flush with the frame above.