I have big kitchen plans. I want to put in tile flooring, stain the cabinets darker (or paint them if I can get the hubby to jump on board), replace the counter top, put in a tile backsplash, and install a new sink. Sometimes things in life aren’t the right time, and right now it is not the right time to invest that much time and money into my kitchen. To tide myself over, I implemented a mini makeover that cost $4.00, an hour of my time, and required only scissors and shelf liner.
Adventures in DIY
Add an Elegant Hanging Light the Easy Way
For the longest time, we’ve wanted some kind of light above the sink in our kitchen. We finally settled on a simple DIY solution to this problem using the IKEA Hemma cord set. The cord set comes with a long electrical wire that has a normal 2-prong plug on one end, and a light socket on the other. The light socket has a removable screw piece to allow you to attach a lamp shade. The screw piece holds the shade securely onto the light socket end of the cord. The cord itself is quite strong and can easily handle a glass shade hanging from it.
The cord set comes with an open eye hook, but it didn’t work in our situation because there was no stud in the ceiling where we wanted to hang the light. We ended up buying a hanging plant hook kit. We had to modify the hook slightly because the plastic wire hanger that came with the Hemma was too small to fit over the end of the planter hook.
To fix this, I simply cut the end off of the hook with a small hacksaw. The metal was very soft and this took only seconds. If you don’t have a hacksaw, you could possibly use heavy duty wire cutters to cut the end off.
These hanging kits are designed to hold hanging planters which are pretty heavy and come with the parts to install on either a stud or directly into drywall. The drywall anchor is a spring toggle bolt, which is capable of hanging a lot of weight. This is a bit overkill for this project, but it doesn’t hurt. For other projects, you may want to check out which kind of drywall anchor would be right for you. To install this toggle bolt, I used a half-inch spade drill bit to drill a hole in the ceiling large enough to accept the toggle bolt when it is folded.
Once the hole has been drilled, simply insert the toggle bolt and screw the hook until it is tight against the ceiling.
We planned to power the light using a power socket under the kitchen cabinets by the sink but we didn’t want the plug just hanging down from the ceiling for two reasons; 1) Because it is unsightly and 2) because the Hemma wire was several feet too long. What we decided to do was to run the wire inside our cabinets and leave the extra wire on top of the cabinet. To do this, we used a larger drill bit to drill a hole bottom shelf and the top of the cabinets as close to the back corner as possible.
A 1-inch spade drill bit which was just wide enough to handle the plug.
We threaded the wire through the holes and tied a knot just before the bottom hole leaving enough on the other side to reach the plug under the cabinets. This knot should prevent any extra wire from coming through the hole.
To keep the wire out of the way and tidy inside the cabinet, we used small nails to tack it to the back side of the cabinet facing. This also help rout the wire neatly around the inner shelves.
We got a shade from a local Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $2.00. These stores are great because they have a wide variety of random construction pieces and furniture for great prices and the money goes to help Habitat for Humanity. The particular share we got was a bit too big to fit on the screw part of the hemma, so I filed down some of the plastic on the hemma’s light socket to make some room. I was only able to thread a couple of threads on the socket with the screw piece, but that was plenty to hold the shade.
All in all, the IKEA Hemma proved to be a great solution for us. There are tons of really great examples out there using it as well. It allows you to be creative and still coming up with a professional look. If you have used the Hemma for a DIY lighting project, we’d love to see what you did! Leave us a comment with info and a link.
A Simple Valentine’s Day Message
I wanted a simple but sweet Valentine to give out to my students. I searched Pinterest and did not find anything that had the degree of simplicity I wanted. That is when I decided to make my own. I used the paint program that comes with Windows 7 and I was pleasantly surprised with the versatility and ease of use of this program. I’ve had a thing for owls recently, so naturally I made my own owl graphic.
Turn Your House into a Spooky Face for Halloween
Many people think the fronts of cars look life faces. There is even an entire Flickr set devoted to car faces! Well, ever since I saw my house for this first time, I thought my house look like a face. The windows are perfect eyes and the garage looks like a mouth.
I needed to put my anthropomorphic house theory to the test. (Yes, I had to look up how to spell anthropomorphic.) For Halloween, I decided to use my house face palette to create a scary face. Adam and I had different visions for our beauty, so we sketched out our ideas using paint to end our squabble. Yes we are that anal retentive. Our ideas were:
Idea 1: White Pointy Teeth with Black Background
Idea 2: White Square Teeth with Black Background
Idea 3: Black Square Teeth
Idea 4: Black Pointy Teeth
Although we thought Idea 1 would likely look the best, we decided to go with Idea 4. We figured cutting out black teeth would be easier than trying to create a black background. This is how we did it.
Materials:
- Big Black Garbage Bags
- Permanent Double Sided Tape
Tools:
- Good Quality Scissors
We cut the edges off each garbage bag to create black squares of material. From there, we cut out isosceles triangle shapes to use as the teeth. We didn’t measure any sizes, but we did use the square pattern in our garage door to measure sizes.
In the two top windows, we added a pupil to add to the eye effect. Using the double sided tape, we put up each tooth one at a time.
Because we didn’t officially measure the teeth sizes, the last two teeth had to be cut smaller to make them fit. We did this to the last two teeth so there wouldn’t be one tooth that was noticeably smaller than the rest. This way the overall visual sizes of the teeth look balanced.
More double sided tape was used on the bottom teeth than the top because we were concerned water or wind might more easily remove these teeth. The bags had a bit of static cling which also helped them stick to the garage door nicely.
We lost daylight pretty quickly, but I couldn’t help but snap a nighttime shot. Of course that adds to the drama of our scary faced house!
Here is a daytime shot from the next day.
Overall this was an easy and fun project. It only took Adam and I less than an hour to complete the entire project, including creating idea sketches in paint. Can you turn your house into a face? Send us your results!
Creating a Duct Tape Chair
I purchased a dome chair from a big box store last year and it didn’t hold up very well. The chair part ripped and fell of the frame. Since the frame was still left intact, I didn’t want to throw it away -so I reused it to make a new chair. Using duct tape (the best duct tape of all – Nashua 357), I created a new frame for the chair. This project was quick, cheap, and easy; it used less than $10 in materials and only an hour of my time. The result is a chair that is much sturdier than the original I purchased.