Kim from A Girl and a Glue Gun wanted to make a drum shade for her kitchen, but couldn’t find a shade in a thrift store. So she made her own drum shade and put up a tutorial on her blog.
Since Kim rents, she couldn’t take down the light fixture, so she sat the drum right one top of it. She even dyed the fabric herself. Looks great. [Craft]
I’ve talked about how I don’t have TV before on here, and one of the reasons is because of overexposed celebrities, like Snooki or Kim Kardashian or Charlie Sheen. It’s annoying to hear about the same person (or event) over and over again, especially if you don’t care about it in the first place.
So I love this hacked remote control on Make that automatically mutes celebrities. It’s called Enough Already.
The way it works is, a hacked piece of computer hardware called an Arduino automatically reads the closed-captioning transcript as it airs and then mutes the TV for 30 seconds when it picks up certain words.
That way, you can tell it to avoid the word “KARDASHIAN,” and whenever that comes up on the programming, the TV automatically goes quiet.
The whole thing cost $70 to make.
If you are technically inclined, here’s more on the project from Make:
Is this the remote of the future? I hope so.
Instead of paying $60 for a shower curtain with an octopus on it, you could paint your own like the above example from Casasugar.
Of course, that presupposes that you have the artistic skill to paint a design like that. I sure don’t, but it’s nice to dream. [Craft]
This DIY project from Instructables shows you how to make a Magnetic Key Holder with your light switch.
All you do is wrap a magnet in some kind of cap and then put it in the light switch, like so:
The result is an elegant key holder right by the door. No need for a hook or bowl to hold those keys when you’ve got this more minimalist solution instead. [Lifehacker]
Our shower is finished!
I have mentioned our ongoing bathroom remodel before on here. It is taking a long time because Mr. Savvy only has time to work on it one day a week. Also, our bathroom was really gross and needed a lot of work. Here is the original tub:
Here is what it looks like now:
Before:
After:
It’s sad that I can’t get better pictures of the finished shower (it’s cramped in there), because it looks great. Also, putting the new shower in was a lot of work. We had to remove the old tub and linoleum, plumb the new shower head and faucet, and put in new cement board behind the tub. Then we had to tile:
It took three months.
Next we’re starting tiling the floor.
My goal is to get the bathroom completely done this year. I hope we make it.
I was saying the other day that I thought having an ice cream maker was one of the best “extras” you can have in a kitchen. After all, nothing beats homemade ice cream. But if you don’t want to buy one, you can try to make your own ice cream maker like this guy did. And then make his awesome-looking Elderflower Ice Cream.
Or you can ditch the machine altogether and make ice cream by hand using basic kitchen implements and the freezer. The results look tasty:
Here’s another method to make ice cream without the machine using evaporated milk and ice cube trays. I’m not sure how it tastes, but it looks good:
Personally, if I didn’t want to spring for a new ice cream maker, I would skip all this and look around some thrift stores for a hand crank model. They show up more often than you would think.
Savvy Housekeeping Ice Cream Recipes Round-Up:
According to Make, all you have to do to make your own Hedge Maze Area Rug is to tape off the pattern and carve out the design with a pair of electric hair clippers.
The results are pretty cool looking. And there’s no reason to stick to the labyrinth design–any grid-like design sounds like it would work great. [Apartment Therapy]
There’s an article in Wired on How To Build Your Own Outdoor Movie Theater.
Dave Banks wanted a outdoor movie theater–which consisted of a projector, dvd, two speakers and a large screen–but he didn’t want to pay the retail price of $3,499 for one, so he made his own. He even made the 12′ x 6′ screen with pvc piping, buckets, rope, cement, and a piece of blackout cloth.
The total price, which included $125 for help assembling the screen, was only $248.
That’s some pretty awesome savings for a bit of work. [Lifehacker]
Morgan Satterfield from The Brick House put up a project on how to make a rope wall. It’s a stylish room divider that is especially great for big open spaces.
To make the rope wall, Morgan that wood boxes custom built “with evenly spaced rope sized holes drilled through the top and bottom.” The ropes were strung through the top and tied off on the bottom to keep them taut. Then the box was screwed close.
The cost of this project wasn’t bad, says Morgan:
With this design the overall costs are kept pretty low for such a big impact. Rope is cheap, especially when bought in bulk, and wood boxes are very low cost to build. The true cost is going to be labor and time – it’s just a tedious and super repetitive process.
Of course, if you have carpentry skills, you could make your own box with wood and a drill–and very careful measurement.
The above is a picture of our first chicken egg, laid on June 10, 2010. Last Friday marked one year of laying.
As I mentioned in the post on one year of owning chickens, now that the chickens are adults, they are laying 2-3 eggs a day. It took them a while to get up to that rate. The other two chickens, who are younger, didn’t start laying until October.
So, given that, the first year tally is a lower overall than it should be in the future. Still, I am happy to report that my three chickens yielded 477 eggs in the first year of laying.
And we ate (or gave away) every one of them. The eggs, not the chickens.
