We bought a house!

It needs a lot of work. I’ll share some progress & pics & notes here. Even if nobody reads this, the writing might help me vent about all the crazy prior work I’m uncovering.

Click Belmar Renovations to see all posts in this category.

Design priorities:

• Comfortable standing height.
• Room for an external monitor behind my laptop.
• Not much extra room, to discourage clutter & piles of papers.
• Try to blend in to the living room, don’t make it look like an office.
• Let me “close up shop” at the end of the day and switch to a non-work mindset.
• Affordable and easy to build quickly.

I’ve been using it for a couple months and I love it. Here’s how it looks when I’m not in work mode:

My first iteration was simple: a basic cabinet with a folding front, and a top slot to let me access wiring & storage behind the monitor:

I got that all glued up and let it dry on a Sunday, and then hung it on the wall and started work Monday morning. I immediately realized a big flaw. In my zeal to make it as small as possible, I didn’t account for the angle from my eyes down to the monitor. After only a few minutes of trying to use it, I gave up, got my jigsaw, and sawed the cabinet top off.

That made it workable for the first week, and gave me a few days to ponder how to replace the top. By the time the next weekend rolled around, I had come up with my vision of a hinged folding lid that doubled as shelves, and was excited to take it down and get to work. Here’s a view of the left side and the accessory hooks. You can see that the awkward block of wood on top has a purpose: it’s the support for the opened shelf. (It would probably look nicer if I’d attached the block to the cabinet instead of the shelf, but I didn’t think of that at the time.)

The behind-monitor storage has worked out well. I slide my work laptop and my personal laptop in on the right side, and the left side has plenty of room for wires and a power strip. I tilt the monitor back when I’m working, and forward when I need to get behind it.

I initially planned on staining it a natural color, and maybe stenciling a geometric design on the front. But when I attached the hinges, the screws were too long and poked out. Not wanting to make a needless Home Depot trip during the early covid-19 stay-at-home days, I decided on a whim that I would cover the screws up with random blocks of wood and work them into the final design. If I were to do that over, I’d make sure the blocks were square, instead of just grabbing them from my scrap bin as-is. My wanna-be Mondrian paint job was all the harder because of the out-of-square blocks.

One last thing I would have liked to do: move the outlet on the wall. That’s pretty easy, but I don’t have any leftover paint from this room. The dangling cords don’t bother me enough to escalate a diy-desk project into a repaint-the-living-room project.

Here are a couple more photos and some build notes, in case you’re trying to refine your own design or build something like it yourself.

It’s attached to wall studs with 4 long-ish drywall screws, just like you might use when hanging a kitchen cabinet. The inner layer of plywood was the original cabinet. I added the outer layer to the right side as a shelf support, and to the left side for symmetry. The little blocks in the bottom corners were from when I was experimenting with fastening the sides of the cabinets. I started with trim-head screws but they were splitting the plywood. I used those blocks to sink the screws into. (Turns out they make nice little shelves.) Ultimately I switched to my air nailer. I really don’t think it mattered much, as the glue & clamps did the real work.

A quick and easy way to stand up while working at your laptop.

Benefits:

• Inexpensive: $20 for a pair of two jack stands at Harbor Freight, plus some scrap wood.
• Portable: small enough for me to carry in to my office on the train.
• Easy to alternate between standing and sitting.
• Works anywhere: set it up on any table or desk, with adjustable height.

I started at Thomas in a temporary office, pending some other people’s office moves. It didn’t make sense to order new furniture since we knew there was an upcoming office shuffle, but I needed a way to stand and work.

I got about 9 months use out of it before moving into a new office with a fancy motorized desk. Then I took it apart and brought the jack stand home, where it’s now helping me with more traditional tasks like putting a tube in my riding mower’s tire.

The sheet of felt underneath is to prevent scuffing the desktop. (If it were a more long-term setup I would’ve figured out how to put pads on the feet.)

I had to replace the battery on my watch last week. I ran into a snag and figured out a good solution, which I thought I’d share here.

1. Pry the back off – easy.
2. Get the battery out – easy.
3. Read the tiny number on the battery – harder.  I couldn’t find a magnifying glass, but I managed to read it with my phone camera’s zoom.
4. Order a new battery online – easy.

The battery came in the mail a few days later. I thought it would take two minutes to install and I’d be done. But I couldn’t get the caseback on. It’s a water-resistant watch, and the rubber gasket made it too tight to press closed with my hands.

I worked at the watch & jewelry repair counter JC Penney as a teenager. I know a watch press is the right tool for the job, but I don’t spend money on professional tools for occasional personal use. I looked to youtube for advice but didn’t find anything too useful. I found one video saying that all you need is some newspaper underneath (to protect the crystal) and a big tool (like a wrench) for some leverage when pressing down on the back. Tried that, but I still couldn’t get enough force to close it.

I decided to try a clamp. I grabbed some scrap wood—big enough to cover the crystal and the back, small enough to avoid pressing on the strap lugs—and a C clamp, and started tightening the clamp. But it kept slipping off center as I tightened it. I could’ve cut out a wooden circle to hold it (like the die for a watch press), but I didn’t feel like spending that much time on it, so I tried a few more times to carefully center the clamp and slowly tighten it.

On one of those attempts, just as it was starting to slip a tiny bit, I realized that a second clamp would help me put pressure on the other side and re-center it. After a little more progress tightening both clamps, I needed a third one. A couple more turns on each clamp got me the satisfying click of the watch back snapping into place. With a bit of nervous anticipation, I took the clamps off and checked my work. I was relieved to see the crystal was still intact and the watch was still ticking.

Disclaimer: If you have a valuable watch, you probably should buy the right tools or pay a professional.

My natural sleep position looks like I’m doing an army crawl, or climbing a rock wall. Sprawled out on my stomach, with one leg up, the other leg down, hips twisted, and neck twisted. I’ve tried for years to break that habit, in vain. I have no problem starting out on my back: I lay down, close my eyes, and I’m asleep in 30 seconds. But sometime in the middle of the night I roll over in my sleep, and I wake up all twisted with a sore back.

I know this is bad for my back. I’ve had many chiropractors and doctors tell me so. There are many good articles explaining why sleeping on your back is best. However, when I looked for advice on learning how to be a stomach sleeper, I couldn’t find anything great. The best I could find was asking Chrissy to nudge me (which depends on her being awake to notice), sewing tennis balls to my pajamas (to make me uncomfortable when I roll onto my stomach), or propping myself up with a variety of pillows (didn’t work for me). I thought to myself, I just need some straps or a giant clamp to keep me locked in position. Like an astronaut strapped in on the space station. So that’s what I made!

The top piece swivels out so that I can get into bed. After I’m in place on my back, I swivel it onto my hips and I’m locked in.

I’ve been using this for a couple of months and I haven’t rolled onto my stomach once. At first I would wake up a few times a night and fight it, and then semi-consciously realize what was going on and go back to sleep. Now I rarely wake up at all. Maybe one day soon I’ll be well enough trained to ditch the clamp.

Some notes & build tips, in case you’re stuck in a similar predicament and want to try this yourself …

Read the rest of this entry »

I made these simple floating shelves for our new basement room. The kids put their assembled Lego creations on the shelves, and keep their sorted parts in the organizers below.

I started by assembling 3 “ladders” from 2×3’s, and screwing them into the concrete block wall – 3 screws in each. Then I tacked on plywood tops and sides, sanded, and painted. They turned out to be very sturdy.

Second to pallet boards, 2×3’s are quickly becoming my favorite go-to material for DIY projects. (You can also spot them in my utility shelves through the doorway in the last shot.) They’re the cheapest studs at Home Depot. Even after digging past the really-warped ones, they’re never totally straight, but that’s not a problem for a project like this. I straightened the long ones out on the wall when I screwed them in, and the “rungs” of the ladder are short enough to hide any warping.

I built a simple standing desk last weekend.

Since the rest of the family also uses the PC and prefers to sit, I had to make it easy to switch between standing and sitting modes.

We already had the IKEA Fredrik desk. I added two things:

1. A wall-mounted sliding monitor holder.
2. A collapsible plywood keyboard & mouse shelf.

Total cost (not including some scrap wood and a few screws) was $3.50, and it only took an hour or so to build.

For the wall rails, I bought a 10-foot length of 1/2″ conduit. I drilled some deep holes into scrap 2×3’s to sink the conduit into, and secured the blocks to the drywall with wall anchors. The bracket for the back of the monitor uses 3/4″ set-screw couplings (found right next to the conduit in Home Depot). I replaced the set-screws with longer machine screws, so that I could put them through the scrap of mdf board that I screwed into the back of the monitor.

When the monitor is down in sitting position, I rest it on top of an external hard drive. It takes about a minute to convert to standing position. First I move Chrissy’s baskets and slide the monitor up, resting it on the top shelf of the desk. Then I assemble the mouse/keyboard shelf and I’m ready to work.

Some detailed pictures:

The keyboard stand is 3 pieces of interlocking plywood. The two bottom pieces are notched in the middle, so that I can fit them together in an “X” shape. The top piece has a few scraps of wood nailed to its underside, to lock in place around the X. You can see a much more elegant take on the same idea in the StandStand. When taken apart, it leans inconspicuously beside a cabinet on the other side of the room.

A set of coasters that I made last fall, from scraps of pulled-apart pallet wood.

Some notes & tips on making them:

Paint the sides in a contrasting color, so that the target (the top of the coaster) is clearly distinguishable when you’re putting your drink down.
Read the rest of this entry »

Even before I finished building my chair, I started thinking about building this side table. I struggled to find a design that I liked. It needed to be fairly short, and I wanted to match the simplicity of our Adirondack chairs. Most of the tables I found had tall, tapered legs, or elaborate tops & shelves. I finally found inspiration in this DIY modern outdoor patio collection. The key is in the way that the outer boards on the tabletop line up with the legs, making the plain, wide legs look deliberate.

I got a little bit impatient on this project and decided to see if I could do it without any screws or nails. Using only wood glue and clamps, it turned out to be very sturdy. (I wouldn’t recommend using it as an extra seat or a stepstool, but it’s plenty strong enough to hold a couple of drinks, a book, or a laptop.)

I finished it the same way I did the chairs & flowerboxes: one coat of primer, one coat of paint, one coat of polyurethane.

Lately I’ve been having fun building things from reclaimed and scrap wood. Here are a couple of my recent pallet wood projects, at home on our front porch:

I love woodworking, but I don’t spend a lot of money on my hobbies.  Pallet wood saves me from buying lumber at Home Depot, or even worse, forking over the money to buy good hardwood boards. Pallets appeal to me in other ways, too: I like knowing that I’m saving a little bit of waste from a landfill, and I like the perspective that I gain from having to sand, straighten, and clean up the rough wood. I’ve also found that it’s satisfying to make-do with irregular sized boards. Rather than just buying the correct amount of stock-sized lumber off the shelf, I force myself to work with the boards I have, and make adjustments to my plans.  That really makes me think through my design carefully, and be more creative in improvising on it.

My first and biggest challenge was figuring out how to take pallets apart. They’re held together with spiral-shank nails, making the boards nearly impossible to pry loose. I started out by trying brute force, but that was frustrating because I wound up splitting so many of the boards. After scouring the internet for tips & doing a bit of experimenting, I’ve settled on a quick & reliable technique. I drill a small hole next to each nail, which relieves the pressure and makes it fairly easy to pry the boards loose with a flatbar & hammer.

I’m busy at work on a couple of current projects with pallets and with other scrap boards.  I’ll share these, with more detailed instructions & tips, in a few upcoming posts.  If you find them useful, or have tips of your own, I would love to hear from you in the comments.