DIY Tailoring

"I don't wanna be a pirate"

Finding shirts that fit me both in long arms and narrow torso is pretty difficult. Usually, off the rack shirts are puffy and look terrible on me.

Some companies make "fitted" shirts. Sometimes this is fitted enough and sometimes it is not. Today, I looked up online how to take in a dress shirt and tried it out. I'm very happy with the results. Check out the before and after...

Before:

I did not stuff the shirt with newspaper or anything else to make it look extra puffy.

After:


note: the pants are different, the pants in the before pic I bought from J Crew for $60, the pants in the after pic are Dockers that I got for $6.99 at the Thrift Store.

Short video on how to do this:

Got rid of some stuff

I've had 2 bikes in the living room for too long, and just sold them on eBay. Cha-ching!

$500 plus more room to live in!

Stainless Steel Straws in action

Made these drinks for a cocktail hour yesterday, and my new straws worked and looked awesome, especially for Mojitos------no crushed mint leaves in your mouth.

Our bedroom (in progress)

So here is a shot of our bedroom in progress. The side tables, I got at a furniture auction about 5 years ago. They had longer legs on them, see the before and after, then repainted them black and added new knobs to them.

originally


shorter legs

Made some pillows

I have this week off, so I had time to do another project. We are decorating our bedroom and following a photo of a bedroom we liked on Flickr. The bedroom has blue and white pillows with a monogram on them. After searching a few stores we couldn't find them, so I made them! From scratch!

I started the embroidery of the R and Rachel finished it, then she did the J all by herself.

I snapped some photos during the process of making the pillow today. It's not retail quality, but its pretty good, you'd have to get pretty close to see my mistakes.

I had to make the monogram patch double layered so that the blue wouldn't show through. And the back of the pillow is an envelope closure. All in all, pretty simple, just took a few hours.

Converted a King to a Queen

We have a Queen sized bed but are open to a King at some point in the near future. We also found a Pottery Barn duvet cover that we really liked, but it wasn't for sale at PB any longer. On eBay, only the King kept showing up for sale. So..... I bought the King and planned to cut off 1.5 feet to convert it to a Queen.

But then, my lovely wife figured out that we could turn the duvet cover inside out, sew up a new seam 20 inches from the edge (to make it Queen width) and then we we turned it back right side out, the extra cloth would be hidden on the inside and if we switch to a King in a year or two, we just need to rip out the simple stitch and presto!

No photos, the photo below shows the fabric though. You can't tell that this wasn't always a Queen duvet cover.

Bathroom Cabinet

So, most of our bathroom is black and white. The sink cabinet, however, is not; its just ugly. We decided that it would look cool and be fairly easy to paint the cabinet to allow it to blend in well with the rest of the room. Additionally, we are planning on making black and white a "theme" of our bathroom with matching towels and shower curtain.

The process was pretty easy, just took off the door, sanded it down, masked off the area and then put a layer of white primer on. The finish "white" color was a custom mix at Home Depot. We didnt want it to be actually white, because the tiles are actually cream as is the dingy linoleum. So this is called "Marble Falls" by Glidden.

Then, I went back with a small brush and applied the black to the front faces. Finished off with some new chrome and white hardware, as well as new white hinges and we think it looks mighty nice.

Total cost was about $30 and one afternoon.

Bike mount

The bike mount is a Home Depot hack. Each bracket was about $3. So $6 later plus 4 wall stud molly type bolts and instant bike rack.

My New Desk

So, the desk in our bedroom has been used more as a place to put stuff we don't want to put away than as a place to study. This makes using it even more difficult because I have to clean it off whenever I want to use it.

I didnt want to show this photo, but here is the desk just before I began this project.



I wanted to build a drop leaf desk that would fold out of the way when not in use, so as to assist us in not accumulating a mess. Ikea has a a drop leaf table called the Norbo that I basically copied.


The table top is from the Ikea "as-is" section and was a cabinet door at one point and it cost $2. The bracket is a wooden shelf bracket from Ikea ($7) and then the wood and hinges are from Home Depot that I painted white ($11).







The desk chair folds up and hangs on the back of the bedroom door.



It works really well, folds out of the way when not in use and isnt a place for us to put stuff.



Total cost was $20! Bonus is that it matches my Macbook.

Trunk: the rebirth

As mentioned previously, I got this old trunk off of Craigslist for $40 and it needed some work. Well, it needed more than "some". About 20 hours or so later of sanding and repairing and stripping and etc.....it was done.

The brass hardware polished up nicely with steel wool and brass polish and looks almost like new. I couldnt find replacement hinges that were the exact same size, so I repaired the ones that it came with.





While we were originally going to use it as a coffee table, we found it worked better as a bench in our living room, inside is our collection of board games.



Again, here is the before picture:

Kitchen Light

Rachel posted earlier how our kitchen light was ugly and that we got this stainless steel one for a good price. Well, a few months ago I put it up.

This was kind of a big deal; I've never hardwired a light before. It was fairly simple, I had to do a few modifications but nothing too crazy.

We were going to buy a medallion to cover where the old light was, but instead I stole the kitty's food placemat, cut a hole in it, taped it to a piece of cardboard and put it up. Crafty! (yes we replaced the kitty's).


Total spent:
$13 for the light
$1.99 for the IKEA "medallion"

btw--I kept the old light just in case we decide to take the new one with us :)


off


on! Yeah it works!

Our Apartment

Kitchen

Shelving that Jeremy Put Up

Living/Dining Room

Living Room

Living Room

Fun Find!

Yesterday Jeremy and I went to the Boston Building Materials Co-Op which is a non-profit that sells used building materials such as doors, cabinets, sinks and smaller things like door knobs, handles, and other hardware. We went to a similar one in Portland called The ReBuilding Center where we picked up a medicine cabinet for only $5! So we decided to check out this one just to see what they had. It was a little smaller, but we did come across a really cool metal pendant lamp. We had been talking about replacing some of the lighting in the apartment, which really isn't too bad, except for the kitchen which is circle of florescent tubing (!)

Ugly Off

Ugly On

So we thought this was a real bargain at only $13!

Compare this lamp to the one at the top which can be bought for $149!

These types of rebuilding centers are pretty cool, although they are similar to thrift stores so they require patience and sometimes you leave with nothing. But when you do find something, it is a great feeling that you got such a good deal! We will put up some more pictures when we get it up. Jeremy had a creative idea for the "medallion" that needs to go on the ceiling, so stay tuned!


BBMC (Boston)
The ReBuilding Center(Portland)
Habitat ReStores (Sacramento, Chico, etc)

Apartment Pre-Move in

Entryway from the front door


Living room view from the entryway




Livingroom


Living room with interesting trim


View from the living room