Unprocessed October is coming up! And that means a lot of time in the kitchen for me. To help make my life a little easier, I whipped out my recipe book. And to help make your life a little easier, I’m sharing my splash-proof laminated cookbook DIY idea.
How to Make a $75 Work Bench
If you do enough projects around the house, eventually you’ll want to invest in a workbench. It’s not only nice to have a work station, but also helps keep your tools and supplies organized so you’re always ready when a DIY project calls. If you’re caught in an old catch 22 and don’t yet have a workbench on which to build the workbench, never fear – you can probably build this thing on the floor and it shouldn’t take more than a few hours.
Styled Bookshelves | DIY Built-ins
Finishing Built-in Bookshelves
Woohoo! My bookshelf dreams are officially actualized. We are so happy with how this whole wall turned out. DIY built-in bookshelves don’t have to be hard. In fact, they went fairly smoothly. If you missed the original build, check out this post first. Then come back here where I have the easy job of showing a bunch of finished after pictures. I got to play with my new camera Joe gifted me for Christmas, so it made photographing these shelves extra fun.
DIY Built-in Bookshelves
DIY Built-in Bookshelves
Alright, I must confess: I was 100% all for jumping on the IKEA hack bandwagon for this project. There are so many tutorials about retrofitting the “Billy” cabinet to make floor-to-ceiling bookcases. But when the dimensions didn’t fit our space, we had no choice but to go for a custom solution. And that’s usually where the best ideas are hiding.
Before
You can ask Joe, this was probably the thing I was most excited about when we moved into the house. It was at the top of my list, but not high priority compared to some other projects.
Downsize and Declutter
One of Joe’s New Year’s resolutions is to get organized, and I was pleased to hear that! I can definitely help with that one. (His other resolution is get his six pack back – I can probably help with that one too.) Sorry Joe, for outting your two resolutions. Consider it public accountability. You can thank me later. 🙂
Garage “Mud Room”
Maxing out Garage Storage
Ideally, we’d love to have an actual mudroom or entryway some day, but for now, we are making do with the space we have. If you know us, you know we I have a lot of shoes. There’s really not a great space in our house for our shoes to live, so we’ve been keeping them in the garage.
Well, we’ve engineered a somewhat functional solution that we hope to keep improving. It’s a big improvement actually. With winter on the way, this will give us a central location for all the snow pants, jackets, hats and everything else. And it’s a step up from keeping them all in bins!
Reorganizing the Crawlspace
This has been a long time coming. When we moved in, we discovered this incredible secret storage area know as the crawlspace. After moving from a slightly larger house, we needed a place to put boxes and miscellaneous things that either didn’t fit, or we didn’t have a place for right away. So into the crawlspace they went. And the garage. But that’s a whole other story… It was finally time to tackle our storage area and get things to their homes. We spent our staycation working on this, and a few other big projects.
Storage Alert
Bookshelf Hack
Not exactly a hack, but I’m using a bookshelf as shelving for pants. I have a bad habit of over-stuffing drawers full of my clothes, so I needed a remedy. Bingo – used bookshelf! It’s now an extension of my closet and dresser space. I swung by the Goodwill and snatched this up for the cool price of $3.99! I was hoping to find an old dresser that I could gut and refinish, but this thing is the perfect size and needs no work at all. Practically new. And for the price, I couldn’t say no.