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Our New Bikeport, An Open Air Bike Shed


Once the winter rains in California subsided, our family wanted to ride our bikes more.  Our current bike storage location is in the garage, but was inconvenient to get multiple bikes in and out of on a regular basis.  Our large driveway/walkway on the side of our house seemed like a great location to store our bikes.  However, we wanted to protect the bikes, both from the rain and the gaze of bike thieves.

Chris thought of a lightweight structure that had a roof sort of a carport for bikes, i.e. a bikeport.    It’s not a full-blown bike shed because it’s not fully enclosed but it serves the same purpose. Here’s a view of the finished product.  Total cost ~$142

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Finished DIY Redwood Craftsman Fence Gate

After the gate was built, the next steps are to hang it, install hardware and then stain/seal it.   Here is the finished gate after all of these steps.  We are very excited with how it turned out!  Please check out the previous post to see how the gate was made.

Redwood Craftsman gate

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DIY Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Gate (for under $200)

After our fence and driveway project (which was completed 4 years ago), we had planned to build a nice gate.  In that previous post, the following line appears:

Chris has plans to build a nice gate, but that project probably won’t get done for a little while.

So here we are “a little while” later and after some gentle nudging from Shirley, I (Chris) am finally going to make the gate.  I had been planning for the gate for quite awhile, including figuring out the design and buying tools, so when it came time to actually build the gate, it didn’t take too much time at all.  Overall, it took about 1 week or so (maybe ~20 hours of actual work) to build the gate.

Here are the finished two gates that will span the narrow driveway, sitting on our back deck.

building redwood craftsman gate

Continue reading “DIY Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Gate (for under $200)”

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Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Fence Gate (for under $200)

After our fence and driveway project (which was completed 4 years ago), we had planned to build a nice fence gate.  In that previous post, the following line appears:

Chris has plans to build a nice gate, but that project probably won’t get done for a little while.

So here we are “a little while” later and after some gentle nudging from Shirley, I (Chris) am finally going to make the gate.  I had been planning for the gate for quite awhile, including figuring out the design and buying tools, so when it came time to actually build the gate, it didn’t take too much time at all.  Overall, it took about 1 week or so (maybe ~20 hours of actual work) to build the gate.

Here are the finished two gates that will span the narrow driveway, sitting on our back deck.

building redwood craftsman gate

Continue reading “Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Fence Gate (for under $200)”

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DIY Card Catalog from IKEA Rast

As a bibliophile, Shirley is very nostalgic for the library card catalog and had been looking on ebay and etsy for card catalogs.  Chris tried to talk some sense into her pointing out that card catalogs are not very useful pieces of furniture.  “What can you put in a card catalog?”

Then she came across some examples of DIY card catalogs (and similar projects for apothecary cabinets), which were made from dressers.  She was inspired to “try and build one”, which is code for seeing if Chris could do it.

Of course he can. . . 

Here’s the finished product, built using an IKEA Rast dresser.

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Ruler Growth Chart

We wanted to make a growth chart to keep track of the heights of the kids over time.  Shirley’s internet/pinterest browsing eventually came up with a brilliant, but well used idea: a growth chart that looks like a ruler.

We bought a 6 foot tall cedar fence board for $5, and then sanded, and stained using the vinegar/iron treatment described in our farmhouse table post. We thought about how to create the gradation lines and the numbers.  At first we thought about using stencils but figured it would be easier to just use a framing square to draw the various lines to the right length with a black Sharpie marker.

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IKEA Hack 2: Besta Built-In Family Room TV Bookshelf

We love our latest IKEA built-in hack in the great room! (See the built-in IKEA Besta/Pax hack in the living room we finished a year before.) In the great room, we’d had a dark IKEA shelving unit on the TV wall. We decided to replace that shelving unit with a full wall of built-in shelves with lower cabinets, using IKEA Besta shelves, with a few creative touches thrown in. “We” (loosely used; here, meaning 95% Chris, 5% Shirley) probably spent a few hours a day for the better part of a week on this project.

Here’s the result:

 

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