I keep finding old chairs that nobody wants. Last month I grabbed two at a garage sale for $5 total. One had a cracked seat. The other looked like it came out of a 90s kitchen. Both were real wood, so I brought them home. I’ve been messing with different upcycle old chair ideas ever […]

I had two old dining chairs sitting in the garage for months. One seat was cracked, and the other leg wobbled every time you sat down. I almost took them to the curb, but decided to make a bench instead. That’s how I ended up with a DIY bench from old furniture that now sits […]

A round table with leaf is a round dining table that opens up in the middle so you can add an extra board, and that board is what everybody calls the leaf. With the leaf out you’ve got a small round table for four. Put it in, and the table gets longer and turns into […]

A California king bedframe is the longest standard US bed size. You get 84 inches from head to foot, which is four inches more than a regular king, so it’s the bed tall people end up with once they’re tired of their feet hanging off the end. It’s also the size people mix up the […]

A cherry wood bed frame is not cheap. A solid one runs a couple thousand dollars for a queen, and you can get a decent-looking bed for a lot less. So the fair question is whether the extra money gets you anything. I think it does. Most beds look their best on day one and […]

I found mine at a barn sale outside Lancaster for six dollars, half-rotted but with ridges tight enough to scour my shirt collars. That’s the thing about a wooden washboard the things that make it worth owning don’t show at first glance. Most people buying a wooden washboard fall into one of two categories. They […]

Every kitchen has one door that’s worse than the rest, usually hanging right next to the oven or under the sink, where it gets wiped with a wet cloth three times a day. If you want to upcycle kitchen cabinets and not be redoing them by next spring, that’s the door you take off first. […]

I dragged a dresser home off a curb once- seven drawers, good lines- and it sat in the garage for two weekends while I sanded and primed and bought paint for it. Then I tipped it forward to do the bottom edge, and the whole base came apart in my hands because the particleboard had […]

I needed a coffee table, and I had forty dollars. That’s why I started messing around with pallets, and I never really went back. Since then, I’ve built a sofa, a bed frame, a potting bench and a few things that were bad enough that they ended up in the fire pit, which is part […]