Craftmanship

How We Gave our Home an Inexpensive Exterior Makeover

/ ambermoseley / Leave a comment

The Exterior is definitely something we wanted to update when we first bought this house and the updates were actually quite inexpensive. In an ideal world we would change out the yellow siding, but that wasn’t in the budget so we worked from the thought of “how do we make the house look good with yellow siding.”

We updated the shutters, the front door, the porch light, the yard, the garage and the mailbox.

Shutters

We are not a big fan of plastic shutters, so we made our own. For details of how we made them, go here. One thing to keep in mind from the instructions, some 1×4 boards aren’t true 1×4’s so be sure to line the 5 back boards up before measuring the rails.

Garage

We then painted the garage and front door frame to an off white, using Glidden Exterior paint, Color: Fog, and added these magnetic garage hinge and handles for that added finish. Be sure to clean the surface well before painting.

Mailbox

We changed out the mailbox, painted the post with leftover exterior white paint we found in the garage from the previous owners, and updated the numbers.

Front Door

For the front door, we removed the storm door, replaced the door with a craftmans door and painted the door frame to match the garage. We found the front door on marketplace for a fraction of the cost. We did have to drill the hole for the door handle, which turned out to not be too difficult when you bought door lock installation kit.

Removing the storm door frame was comical, I tried for months to pry it off after removing the external screws and no hope. Turns out storm door frames have hidden screws behind the removable covering.

The biggest thing I learned is when in doubt, look it up on youtube. After asking youtube how to remove a storm door frame, it took me around 15-20 minutes to remove!

After removing the storm door frame, I filled in the screw holes with wood fill and sanded to make it flush with the door frame. Again, don’t forget to clean the area well before painting. It took 2-3 coats of paint to cover the red well.

The Yard

We had a massive tree blocking our house and causing a lot more hassle than necessary, so we chopped it down ourselves. We did pay someone to grind the stomp though, which was definitely worth it and we had enough mulch out of it to cover our landscaping we did in the back of the house and to recover all of our river birch trees.

We had a walking path as well that we decided to tear out due to the hassel of upkeep and the frustration of trying to mow around the rock path.

We planted grass and you can’t even tell a walking path was there before. Next spring, we will plant more grass over where the mulch was for the river birch before and our next project for the exterior is replacing the white columns with cedar posts, so stay tuned for that DIY!

Comment with your favorite update and/or questions!

Montessori Toddler Wardrobe

/ ambermoseley / Leave a comment

As our son is getting older and we are having another baby (A girl) in a couple months, we wanted to update his room to allow him more autonomy through better intergrating Montessori. The first step was creating him a wardrobe. We looked online for ones to buy and most will be at least $250 on Etsy. We looked for plans for making one and there weren’t much to go off of either. So we went off the little bit we found and enhanced it. Knowing that eventually our girl would be needing a wardrobe as well and they will be sharing a room for now, we made ours have two places for hanging clothes with the shelves in the middle. We were able to get all our supplies for under $100.

Supplies and Tools:

  • 23/32 in x 4 ft x 8 ft sanded plywood (we went with pine)
  • 3/4 in x 3/4 in x 36 or 48 in Pine Round Dowel
  • Sander if you want it to be more smooth
  • 180 grit sandpaper
  • Kreg Jig
  • 1/4 in screws
  • White wax
  • Wax brush
  • Saw (we used our circular saw to cut the dowel and the 32 in pieces for the shelves and had Home Depot cut the rest)

Optional Supplies:

  • Baskets (amazon)
  • Kid hangers (tjmaxx is great for these or here)

When we bought the board, we brought a piece of paper with our measurements and a pencil so we could mark the measurements on the plywood. This made it alot easier on the guy we asked to cut our board at Home Depot (they cut for free).

Here is what how we measured it out to make the most use of our 4 ft by 8 ft plywood.

  • Two 48 in x 16 in boards (top and bottom)
  • Four 32 in x 16 in boards (sides and middle)
  • Three 16 in x 16 in boards (shelves) -they couldn’t cut those there, at least our guy couldn’t

Once we had the pieces cut and brought them home, we sanded them to give a more finished look.

To make it more sturdy, we used Kreg Jig to make pocket holes to attach all the pieces and for the dowel rod we just measured the length between the opening after it was together and secured by screws. One person just used a nail gun to attach everything. It is really up to you and how sturdy you would like it.

We used white wax to seal/protect the plywood for a natural look and smooth feel. You can definitely paint and stain it. We will be adding beatboard for backing and a 1 in thick trim around the front edges to give it a more finished look.

This was much cheaper to make on our own and it was easy too! Definitely love how accessible it is for our son and excited to see him learn to pick out his own clothes!