Making Books With The Kids

Coming off of the hits with our world famous YouTube channel, my kids and I decided to try our hands at making books over the weekend. First off, they a really easy to do. Second, it get's kids thinking more creatively about what they want to write about. My daughter wrote a wonderful story about a magic flower (which of course she is shopping for a publisher now) and my son created a great picture book about a ninja warrior. The project is super simple, costs close to nothing (or maybe nothing if you have books laying around you don't mind destroying) and can be done on a rainy weekend afternoon. See for yourself.
Book Making for Kids! - More DIY How To Projects PS - it also gave me a chance to build another Instructable and play with some of their new social tools. Winner all around!
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Tagged Children Do it yourself Picture book Projects Publications Publishing Shopping books youtube

Playing Dolls

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This past Christmas, like a lot of families, the cult of American Girl Doll hit our family.  Our daughter got one real doll and one fake doll, but who can tell the difference except the people in the stores and those weird people that dress their kids and dolls in matching outfits. Of course, with dolls comes accessories like clothing and beds and such.  Like with kids, two dolls means two times the clothing.  Where to store it? We pretty much blew our Christmas budget on the one doll.  Grandma kicked in for the other, other grandma kicked in for the bunk bed and yet other grand parents ponyed up for a lot of clothing.  Our daughter was in heaven for a few days until she realized that she needed a closet to put the clothing in.  Boy did she find one.  There is a great one in the catalog, but it is $300.  Not in our budget. What was in the budget was money for 1/4 inch x 10 pine.  A little bit of elbow grease and a Sunday afternoon in the garage with my wonderful little girl and we had a closet.  Over the next few nights, we sanded and painted and within a week, our new little bundles of joy had a nice new closet for all of their clothing.

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This was a really fun project for me as 1.) I got to spend a lot of time with my daughter teaching her to use power tools. And 2.) I've wanted to build an armoire for a long time, but we really don't have room or need for one.  This was essentially the same thing, just smaller with less detail work.
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Tagged My Side Projects Projects american girl dolls armoire closet

Beyond Snake Oil

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For the past couple of weeks, I've had the idea of hosting a video blog all about sales, sales management with a bit of a hint of marketing in it.  I spent some time looking around and have found a couple of decent ones, but nothing really blew my doors off. Therefore, I am really excited to announce my first foray into video blogging, Beyond Snake Oil. My goal is to post Monday, Wednesday & Friday, with maybe a weekend post scattered in for good measure.  I've got a bunch of content floating around in my brain, but I'd love more feedback. I'm still getting used to using iMovie, but I figure that by the fourth or fifth episode, I'll have the hang of editing and lighting.  I'm trying to keep things fairly short so as not to have to deal with editing clips and such. So here is my call: What would you like to see?  Tell me and I'll see what I can do.  See the site, leave me comments, watch the episode.
Tagged Projects beyond snake oil marketing sales sales management video blog

Wanna Be Anthropologie Table

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Holly, my wife, loves the distressed furniture made from reclaimed wood at stores like Anthropologie and Shabby Chic. She has also wanted a sofa table since we moved back into our house. Unfortunately, in the Bay Area (and probably other parts of the country) distressed & reclaimed some how equals 'looks like an antique so charge 4x the price.' Sadly, we don't have a budget for such finds, but we do have an awesome reclaimed lumber place in East Palo Alto. $21 later and we were in business. The table top & shelf were a piece of 2" x 15" that we found in the neighbors basement when they demolished their home. I always thought that it would make a great table top and low and behold. I was going to document the process of building this, but it was pretty easy and I forgot to take pictures of the building. Essentially, route your legs to accept the side members. Cut and route the side members to fit in there (mortise or tenon, but I don't remember which is which). Route the bottom of the legs for the shelf. Glue the back and 2 side members in. Don't forget the shelf. Cut the front up, make your drawers and glue all that together. Flip the whole assembly upside down and attach the top. I used L-brackets, which I'm proud to say are the only screws on the table. I did this because the top of the table is slightly warped and didn't fit quite snuggly. Painting it was a pain in the ass. Holly had one color in mind that Home Deathspot couldn't quite match. I like the whale gray that it turned out, but I'll always think about what it could have been.
Tagged Projects table

Award Winning

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I can now include 'award winning furniture maker' on my resume. For taking the time to share — and because we love that he took the time to build a nice, matching wood bench for his family — we’ll send Schnaars a pair of work gloves. Thanks, Toolmonger.
Tagged Projects piano_bench toolmonger

Piano Bench

A few months ago, we inherited a very, very old and out of shape piano. It is fun to have and our hopes are that it is something that the kids enjoy for a while until they show an interest in playing and we can afford to get this one dialed in. It needs a lot of work. Sadly, while it came with mouse carcasses (seriously) inside, it did not come with a bench. After looking at a few online, I felt like I could have built one in a few hours and have it be as nice as one of the $300 ones that we looked at. I hit the lumber yard. I got a router for Fathers Day this past year and this was really my first experience with that. In all, it turned out okay, though it isn't perfect. Some of the cuts needed to be patched and my inexperience showed me that I could do equally as nice cuts with a mallet and chisel. My glue got really sloppy, too, and I had a hard time cleaning that up after it dried. This was also the first time I've stained anything in about 10 years. I thought that it would be like riding a bike, but that is one of those things that if you don't stay in touch with it, you tend to forget the little nuances about stain. In particular, the drying part. The can said about 6 hours, which turned out to be closer to 4. Between coat sanding helped a bit, but like the glue, once it dried, I was pretty stuck with the result without a deep rough sanding. For the most part though, I'm being my own harshest critic and am really pleased with the way that it turned out.

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Here it is open to store sheet music

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I played a bit growing up, but it is fun to get back into it. If you are older and looking to play again, I came across Shawn Cheeks Easy Piano Guide. Shawn has an excellent form of tableture and that makes piano playing really simple. I'm never going to be, nor do I desire to be, a concert pianist. I just want to be able to play a few staples and enjoy it. Shawn does this. Check it out:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ7qKXYJjnE&rel=1]

Tagged Projects piano piano_bench piano_lessons

I've Been ToolMonger'ed

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ToolMonger, one of my favorite blogs just got better when they picked up my work bench in the Flickr pool. I love ToolMonger as it meets a couple of key criteria a.)It is relevant. Having been locked up in the apartment for 9 months, I've been having project withdraw. It is good to be working on things again. b.) They love doing things over the top. This is how I would be if I had unlimited time and money. A benchtop planer? How money is that? c.) They are funny. d.) One Beer Projects. The best kind, especially when you can make a list of 5 or 6 of them. e.) What's not to love about tool porn? Most importantly, these guys are great writers who have offered up countless suggestions on which tools to use and how to fix things. It is an honor to be a small part of that community. Thanks for the love.
Tagged Projects

A Work Bench for Cheap

I built a very cool work bench over the weekend. Actually, it was just a few hours on Saturday and was a really fun project for me and the kids.
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I also did an instructable in case you are interested in how to do this or to make something similar. That is here.
Tagged Projects

Yodelin-Baby

I recently got my hands on a very cool 'Yahoo! Yodel' light activated voice box. You know, like the kind that come in novelty birthday cards that sing when you open them and such. Only instead of a midi-version of Happy Birthday, this one yodels. As you can imagine, for me and my 3 & 4 year olds this thing has been the greatest thing since short sleeves. We've spent the last week hiding it around the house so that when Holly opens drawers or cabinets, it yodels and we break into hysterics. We'd also leave it in the bathroom, so that in the middle of the night, when shes half asleep and flicks on the lights, it would yodel. Again, it would wake us, she would curse, the three of us would giggle and fall back to sleep. Tonight, though, Holly issued the ultimatum and got tired of hearing it each time she opened the silverware drawer and threatened to throw it out. To avoid this boring fate for such a cool toy, we thought that it would be great fun to take the device apart and embed it into one of my daughters baby dolls. I tried to convince her to let me cut her head apart so that I could put it into one of the dolls eyes so that when it opened its eyes, it would yodel, but she wasn't going for anything that had the potential to cause permanent damage. So I had to just put it into the dolls outfit with the light sensor sticking out of a pocket. Thus, each time the baby was picked up, it would yodel. As you can see from the video, this was more fun than just about anything and this was after doing the same routine 15 or 20 times. I see many more experimental dolls in our future.
Tagged & Others GOOG MSFT Projects YHOO

24 Hours A Day

One of the things that you learn when you are building a house, going through an acquisition and have a wife with cancer is how to maximize the entire 24 hours in a day.  There hasn't been a whole lot of free time to do blog posts on either site, but I have found how to get the most out of every minute.  I don't think that I am doing anything different, it's just you learn to ignore the trivial many.
Tagged Cancer Good Things Projects
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