What kept coming up while I read headboard bench tutorials wasn’t the paint or the cushion; it was people admitting their first one wobbled, and one blogger said more than one of hers did before she got it right. So if you want to make a DIY bench from old furniture, like a headboard or […]

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. […]

There’s a chair in my garden right now with a fern growing out of the seat, and it looks lovely, and it should never have ended up there. It wobbled; I decided it was finished, I cut a hole in the seat and called it a planter. Two years later, I took a proper look […]

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 […]

The first time I tried to paint furniture without sanding, three coats of good latex came off the top in one rubbery strip, the way a label peels off a jar, and all I did was pull up a bit of painter’s tape I’d stuck there to mark where the lamp would go. It was […]

Almost every DIY coffee table makeover I’ve watched fall apart did so on the top, usually within the first month, because the top takes the hot mug, the feet on a Sunday night, and the juice cup somebody left there overnight. At the same time, the legs get kicked maybe twice a year. So I […]