For my This Old Fixer-Upper project, we decided to cover the plaster ceiling with pine tunque-and-groove panels rather than try to scrape off the wallpaper and paint the ceiling. The original plan was to use 4' x 8' sheets of panels that looked like tongue-and-groove boards painted white, but we found the actual stuff at Menards for only a little bit more money per square foot. A pretty good deal I thought. All of the materials cost me a little over $400, including the brad nails, paneling adhesive, polyurathane, etc. 

Before my trip to colorado, I decided to get the Jeep in tip-top shape and install a lift kit I bought a while ago and put new off-road tires on it. I also had some goodies to beef up the steering box, and I performed a little body modification to clear the bigger tires. Yay!

With nothing but grass growing in the 1/3-acre yard - and massive amounts of perrenial flowers surrounding the house that we had no idea about until spring - we had a big canvas to do whatever we wanted with. I wanted lots of trees! And a big garden! No, bigger than a garden. A food forest! At least that was the plan.

When I needed a conditional field for a Drupal 7 content type, of course I just googled "drupal conditional fields" to see if a module exists. One did exist, but its D7 release came with a big, red flag warning any would-be downloaders that it's not supported any longer and is vulnerable to security issues. Instead of risking it on the entrerprise-level website, I decided to code up a solution myself. And I would use JavaScript inserted by the PHP code. Easy!

Unlike the other camera I tried to adapt to my small collection of old manual focus lenses - a Nikon J1 - this Sony NEX-6 camera body is perfect! With manual focus lenses, it's all about getting the focus just right. If it's not perfect, then it's blurry. And a blurry, out of focus image is trash. Same thing for exposure. Here's why the Sony NEX-6 is the perfect camera body for use with old, manual focus lenses.

In this episode of This Old Fixer-Upper, Danny does electrical, HVAC, insulation... and then, tragedy strikes [not really]. All this and more, coming up!

I was gifted some walnut slabs. Actually, the truth is, my friend didn't want them and threw them into a bonfire, and before the flames could devour them I pulled them out and loaded them onto my trailer. You see: he considered them to be waste because they're not flat on both sides. One side is flat and the other is nothing but live edge bark. It's the side of the tree trunk, basically. But I knew that they were not trash, I knew I could find some sort of creative use for them. So I stowed them in my workshop, and waited for an idea to spring to mind. Then, one night while lying awake in bed unable to sleep, it hit me. I knew exactly what I would use these for—and you'll have to continue reading to find out. ;)

Surprise! We bought a house! Overall I think it's a very very good starter home for a couple like us. It's a fixer upper, however, but it will be a great fixer-upper for first-time fixer upper-ers. 

I'm getting ready to finish some walnut live-edge slabs and I wanted to test some different finishes and techniques on a scrap piece first. 

The newly-renovated website for the Kansas Rural Center is complete! Head on over to https://kansasruralcenter.org/ to check it out.

The Jeep -- which I'm now calling the CheroKeeper because it's a keeper ;) -- is finally in my hands! Just as suspected, it has the venerable Christler 8.25" rear end w/ 29 spline axles and np231 transfer case. The mechanicals are in virtually perfect working order. I took it on it's first ever off-road excursion and I was actually surprised at how smooth the jeep conquered those rather large ditches and mud holes. The 4wd worked flawlessly and there was even a little mud to play in.

I'm buying a site-unseen '97 Jeep Cherokee XJ for $1,500! This thing was owned and garage kept for the last 19 years by a nice, older lady who never abused it and maintained it religiously via the dealership, and the Jeep comes with a stack of service receipts as thick as pea soup. That's the only way I would buy any vehicle with 244,000 miles on the odometer...

I made a coffee table!

Here's how I did it...

Last week, my girlfriend and I decided to pick a project out of my collection of Mother Earth News magazines and just do it. Last month, they published an article on cold frame gardening, and that's what we choose. We went to the hardware store, gathered some supplies, and proceded to get our hands dirty! 

The old rims on my 1974 Honda CL200 had seen better days. They were dented, out of true, scratched, a little rusty, and no longer safe. So I ordered some new rims: shouldered aluminum ones. Here's how I installed them.

This is how I painted my old, used motorcycle wheel spokes. The same process should work for bicycle spokes as well. The bike is a 1974 Honda CL200. The spokes are cadmium plated steel (I think). I did this before lacing up the new rims.

This free, online tool helps you choose the right colors and patterns for you and your wardrobe. Experiment with different color combinations right here online before you go shopping. Test out ideas before trying on the suit at the store. You're the designer now!

Just picked up this awesome bike! A 1978 Honda CB750. And a box of parts to go with it.

After building the new webiste for Kansas Public Radio using Drupal 7, I needed a way to export all of the old articles from our Joomla website to the new website. I could have experimented with the Feeds module for Drupal or another Joomla to Drupal solution, but our installation of Joomla was sooooo old and outdated that I couldn't trust anything. I decided to write my own bit of code.

WowBox is a jquery plugin that adds some HTML5 canvass magic to any div on your website. With just a little bit of code, we can make some really super cool 3D effects.