The do-it-yourself projects have changed over the years

When we moved into the house, we did not do much more stuff than the average person. My wife is good at painting and very good at coming up with creative ideas on what could be done. I like planning the ideas into something achievable and executing small build projects. But as time has gone on, this has changed. The first more involved projects where about heating, due to the cost to heat our house. In another section of this web is a list of simple projects we have done that more or less everybody does (the house project section). There is also a section of more complex work, all the way to more advanced woodworking with good woodworking tools.

What I intend to describe in this section of the web is the semi-advanced level. (Like spray-painting, which is good to do for simple as well as more involved work), and a number of good basic thoughts to have when doing both sorts of projects. My major focus on most things I do is to use repetition instead of measurements, as well as start with defining a square angle so not all angles are based on the whims of an old house.

The two pictures on this page are interesting as a comparison. Both of them show our own homemade cabinets in the same bathroom (we have done the tiling as well). Both cabinets are built in a similar way, using MDF. MDF is a very good material to make cabinet building simple, it is easy to cut and route. It is really not suitable for wet environments like a bathroom. Both cabinets are painted with the same high-gloss color. But the first cabinet is hand-painted. The second cabinet is spray-painted. My wife is good at painting, so the difference is not that easy to see. But looking carefully, the bottom one is straight as a mirror. What is mirrored keeps its lines undisrupted. The first one does contain small inconsistencies as always comes from a brush, making the mirrored images a bit less perfect. This is the reason to move to spray-painting. The finished result looks a lot better if high-gloss finished surfaces are targeted.