DIY – Page 13 – Frugal Living

Reupholstering a Chair

January 30, 2015 by Andrew 1 Comment

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, or so the saying goes. Just take a look at this broken chair that Shae found for free.

This solid wood chair was missing its seat and on closer inspection carried the stamp of “Pennsylvania House”. After some digging around the internet, I found out that Pennsylvania House was a furniture company that specialized in mass market reproduction of Colonial style furniture. The company was bought up by LADD Furniture and turned into the mid to high end brand.

Enough history, let’s repair a chair.

The first step is to cut out a new blank. I measured the chair and left a half an inch on each side. Then I transferred those measurements to a sheet of 3/4″ birch plywood (leftover from our washer/dryer platform).

I gave it a quick test fit to see how it looked.

That’ll work! The next step was to stain the bottom of the blank so it matched the chair. I had some leftover walnut stain from our dry erase board project.

After two coats of stain, it was a pretty close match.

I only needed to stain one side because we were going to upholster the chair seat. After gathering some craft supplies we set to work.

The first step was to transfer the seat blank measurements to some high density foam. We added a 3/4″ margin give or take.

We also cut out three layers of polyfill.

Then Shae carefully measured the fabric and we cut that to size.

Here are all of the parts stacked together. At this point, it is upside down.

After carefully lining up the center of the fabric to the center of the plywood, we used a heavy duty hand staple gun to hold the fabric in place.

We did the front and back center’s first because the fabric is striped and we didn’t want wavy stripes.

Working our way out from the centers, we added a lot more staples.

The corners are a bit tricky.

Voila, a “new” chair!

Shae told me I had to be in some of these blog posts. I think she is trying to prevent history from repeating itself where her mother is in none of the family pictures (because she was the one taking the pictures).

Here is the more attractive chair model.

Finally, here is a before and after composite.

Cheap Entertainment

January 11, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

The weather has been quite frigid the past few days, and that has forced us to stay indoors. Here are some of the activities we have been doing to keep ourselves entertained.

Free RedBox DVD Rentals

From now until January 18th, you can get free rentals by using code 45TH8787. Get one movie on day 1, return it the next day and use a different credit card to reuse the code on day 2. Rinse and repeat until you are out of card numbers.

Story Time at the Library

Our public library offers children’s story time every second Saturday of the month and select week nights. Bundle up junior and expose him/her to some culture. Frugal Boy was more interested in the audience than the guitar playing librarian.

Build a Fort

Use boxes, blankets, and furniture to make a fort in your living room. Have fun crawling through it, resting in it, and ultimately, destroying it.

Assemble Christmas Gifts

If you haven’t already, go ahead and assemble some of the Christmas gifts and take them for a spin.

Cook a Fancy Dinner

We made four batches of homemade gorgonzola butternut squash ravioli. Our local high end Italian restaurant serves it for $14/plate. We made it for about $2/plate.

Blend together your filling.

8 oz gorgonzola to 3 lbs roasted butternut squash

Then prepare your dough.

1 egg to 1 cup all purpose flour

Blend and add enough water so it will stick together when you squeeze it.

Knead the dough into sheets.

Keep kneading until the desired thickness is achieved.

Switch to your ravioli maker.

Add the filling.

Crank out beautiful ravioli!

Every 1 cup flour/1 egg will make one sheet of ravioli.

Freeze some for later.

Cook and eat the rest!

What are you doing to stave off cabin fever on these cold winter days?

Parental Right of Passage

December 15, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Some parents have their entire house baby proofed before they even leave for the hospital. That is not us. We take a lazier one step at a time approach. Maybe, just maybe our baby will overlook some dangers. Inevitably, that parenting style lands us into situations like the one below, where a very curious Frugal Boy explores his surroundings. We just keep a constant eye on him in ‘unsafe’ rooms.

When he reaches new milestones, we do another round of baby proofing. Our refrigerator once had magnets and pictures all the way down to the floor, now it serves as an impromptu growth chart with everything below three feet cleared off.

A trip to Menards and $5 later, we had a package of safety latches.

It was pretty obvious that someone else had installed a similar product in the past as there were already holes drilled into our kitchen cabinets.

Growing up, I remember the sink cabinet having the same style of latch installed. Eventually I figured it out, but by then I was also smart enough not to drink bleach.

With the cabinets secured our home is a little more baby resistant.

I couldn’t resist making a spoof infomercial about the safety latches. Frugal Boy was just too gosh darn cute poking his head into the cabinets to check everything out.

Prepping for Winter

December 4, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Hello December! It is about that time of the year where I start to roam about the house looking for drafts. The colder and windier it is outside, the easier it is to find them, and with a 1905 built house, there are always plenty of holes.

Today I sealed up our big living room picture window.

This window along with several others need to be refurbished. Until I find time or an experienced handyman, we’ll just have to make do with the ‘old school’ way of sealing up windows.

These kits are really easy to use. Just measure out your window size, add a couple of inches of margin/wiggle room and cut the plastic. Apply the double sided tape and then very carefully stick the plastic on.

In the above picture you can also see another project I just finished, planting a tree in our front yard. I planted a Japanese “Kousa” Dogwood in the front and a silver linden in the backyard.

The final optional step of plastic’ing up a window is to use a hair dryer to remove the wrinkles and ripples in the plastic.

Now you can enjoy a less drafty room!

Go Green!

You may be asking yourself why we don’t replace our leaky windows with a high efficiency thermal paned unit and the answer to that is that the dollars and cents don’t necessarily add up. Searching for the cost to replace vs repair old growth double sash wood windows turns up articles like this one (link).

Statistically, it is virtually impossible to recoup, in energy savings, the amount of money spent on replacing historic wood windows with new windows before the new windows need to be replaced.

Then there is the aesthetic concern. I love old houses, Shae ADORES old houses, so with any home improvement project that we tackle, preservation is always a factor that is considered.

Old House Lovers, Stop Reading Now

Living in an older neighborhood, we are no strangers to modern times trampling over history. For example, this house that is a part of our neighborhood was recently purchased for $300k. It was designed and built by a prominent architect around the turn of the century during the peak of his career.

Five months later, the house looks like this:

What happened? Did it burn? No. Was it a safety hazard? No. Was it dilapidated and beyond repair? No.

Here are some of the inside pictures taken from the realtors website.

So why on earth is this charming house being torn down? It was purchased by an individual so they could make themselves a private putting green and pretend they are putting for a green jacket.

Not every old house can be saved from idiocy, but by golly we will preserve ours for future generations.

Cut & Cobble – Part 2

November 18, 2014 by Andrew 2 Comments

You can read part 1 here.

I was very relieved to finish insulating the dormer/turret because it was a very labor intensive job. Not only were the rafter cavities oddly shaped, you also had to crawl through a narrow hole on your hands and knees, and then sit or lay in an uncomfortable position while you worked. With that said, I am satisfied with the end result.

The bathroom below feels noticeably warmer. It use to be one of the coldest rooms in the house and down right miserable to visit at 4 or 5 in the morning.

With the dormer finished and a pile of extra foam board I decided to expand the scope of the project and redo the insulation of the spare attic room (connected to the dormer). The previous wall/ceiling assembly was this:

Where the black line was the roof deck (plywood), the gray line below that were battens (1×6) for the original cedar shingles, then the brown 2x4s with the lavender being the old rock wool insulation. Finally the blue layer was some type of sheet rock shown in the picture below and covering all of that up was a flimsy panel veneer (pink layer – bottom).

After clearing away all of the old material I had a clean palette to work with.

Along the walls I insulated between the joists.

Filling the cavities between studs and rafters was simply a matter of measuring

Cutting

Fitting into place and foaming along the edges.

Here is the end result.

This room went much faster than the dormer. I spent a few mornings and a Saturday working on it. I had just enough foam board to do this room. Eventually, I would like to double the R value of this room by installing an additional 2″ of foam board on the underside of the rafters. That would bring this room up to an R 20-25, still well below the recommend value of 30-38 for a cathedral ceiling in zone 5.

Materials cost around $220. Assuming it will cost $700/year to heat our house (based off last years bills) we can make some predictions about the payback period. If we save 5% a year, $700 x 0.05 = $35, then it will take about 6 years to make up the material cost.

A different way to think about it is that we may be able to raise our thermostat by 5% and pay the same amount per year. Last year we kept the temperature at 62°. This year we have raised it up to 65° (about a 5% increase). I do not think that temperature and bills scale linearly though because a larger difference in internal/external temperatures would likely result in a nonlinear amount of heat loss. Anyway, in six months time, I will have another set of bills to add as a second data point in this little experiment.