I made a dog bed for my children. This was not my intention at the onset, but it is what I ended up with and I’m not complaining. A puppy is a puppy is…
On Friday nights we order pizza and watch a family movie, which means that for at least a portion of the evening—before dishes beckon from the kitchen or our two-year-old loses her will to…
Most of the furniture in our apartment has come into our possession second, third, or unknowable numbers of hands ago. Most of that wasn’t bought restored or refurbished, but rescued from the curb on…
When I decided to recover our couch in engineer stripe denim, I did not list among my reasons its ability to withstand human excrement, but here we are. In this little loveseat’s first 12…
If you’ve been reading these tea leaves for any length of time, you might recall that our family currently uses a small, high loveseat as a couch. It’s a simple piece of furniture made…
Our landlord came by yesterday with his van full of hand planes and chisels and other things he figured we might need in order to hang the antique door I came into last week.…
Last spring, when the weather warmed but the virus still raged out of control and playgrounds and parks were closed, I dreamed of a folding lawn chair. We still lived in our old apartment,…
I’m using the term make very loosely here. This is a hardware store canvas apron of the $2.99 variety that my sister Devan gave to Faye years ago, knowing that in a child’s hands…
As a kid, I kept my most special art supplies in an old wine box, with a hinged top and a latch that always went askew. Watercolors and modeling wax and chalky pastels all…
The first thing to know when tackling a reupholstery project is that those time-lapse videos that you see of people rapidly removing staples and easily smoothing fabric before giving a yank here and a…