My last apartment had a “no nails, no exceptions” clause buried on page four of the lease, and I found that out the hard way when my landlord pointed at a single pinhole above my desk during move-out and knocked forty dollars off my deposit. Forty dollars for a hole smaller than a pencil tip. […]

Three items. Evenly spaced. Same height. One per shelf. That’s what almost everybody does, and it’s why the shelf disappears into the wall instead of doing anything. Floating shelves styling ideas that actually hold up start from the opposite place. Odd counts, not even ones. Different heights, not matched ones. Some space you… leave, even […]

By the second week of October, my dining table stops being a dining table. There’s a hot glue gun on it, usually still plugged in because I keep meaning to unplug it and then don’t, and a paper plate with dried paint on it that I should have thrown out days ago, and somewhere under […]

A twenty-dollar nightstand from Goodwill with a tired orange finish and one knob hanging loose is my favorite kind of project, and a painted nightstand makeover on a piece like that fits into a weekend as long as the first day goes to prep. Peeling edges, drawers that grab, rings on the top. Nearly all […]

The first thing I ever made was a set of wall panels out of an old TV box, and they looked fine for about two days, and then the paint dried properly and you could see every single ridge of the corrugation pushing up through the white like a washboard. From across the room, it […]

My first planter came out of the mold looking almost right, and then I turned it over, and there was a lump of gravel sitting in the wall of it the size of a grape, and about a week later the whole rim broke off in my hand while I was carrying it to the […]

The first curtains I made were four yards of quilting cotton with a print I’d been staring at for about twenty minutes in the shop. They went up on the rod and immediately hung there like two tea towels, with no weight at all, and by six the next morning the light was coming through […]

I’ve made seventeen things out of clay since last spring, and about nine of them live in a cupboard now. The ones still out in the house all have one thing in common, which took me embarrassingly long to notice. They hold something: keys, rings, a tea light, a fistful of dried grass. Purely decorative […]

The first plant hanger I tied looked right for about five weeks. Then the pot sat a little lower than it had on day one, lower again after the next watering, and by the end of the summer the whole thing hung at a tilt with the ceiling hook doing most of the work. Nothing […]

Half the DIY paper flower wall decor tutorials are just party backdrops in disguise, and a party backdrop only has to survive one afternoon and a few hundred phone photos. Put those same flowers on a bedroom wall and around week three the big outer petals start folding forward like they’re tired, one or two […]