As much as we love the vertical shipping pallet garden we wrote about in May, it’s flaw is that if you needed to move it off your balcony, you might be in some trouble. Enter the milk crate farm! When the bad economy stalled construction at New York City’s Alexandria Center for Life Science, Chef…
Read MoreWe always thought Kramer had a great idea with his coffee table book…made out of a coffee table. We’re wondering about making one out of a really BIG book, like Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays, Volume 2 which measures 21″ x 16″. Imagine IT with flip-down legs… … That would make one…
Read MoreWe love this bed made of shipping pallets that the endlessly clever Swedish designer Maliin Stoor built for her daughters: a chain of LEDs illuminates it from underneath. Here are details…
Read MoreIt is amazing what a little paint can do to transform a shipping pallet. It even makes the rough grain and embossed printing look good. Add some industrial wheels (which you can get in colors) and you’ve got a swell coffee table (with magazine storage built in)…
Read MoreYesterday, a reader alerted us to the possible dangers of wooden shipping pallets, especially found ones that are so great for d-i-y projects. When we read that even new wood pallets could be subject to chemical treatments, we did some research to figure out how we can happily keep making things out of wood pallets,…
Read MoreWhen we pass cast-off wooded shipping pallets on the street, we find ourselves imagining ideas we’ve collected in our “pallets” file, and trying them out in our minds. We are especially inspired by the visionary open offices Dutch firm Most Architecture designed as a temporary space for the company Brandbase. The client asked that the…
Read MoreJulie Houston, whose home reno we posted last week, sent us this image of the clever window box she made using some of Hurricane Sandy’s twig debris, glued onto plywood frames (made to order by her husband). It came just as we’ve been collecting images of the various diy planters we’ve spotted around town. …
Read MoreThis sculptural mesh chair ($2,000 at yliving.com) by designer Damien Velasquez has a deep, springy ergonomic seat. It looks to us like it was made from standard punched metal sheets used for grilles and other architectural applications. We checked one of our favorite catalogs for McMasters-Carr, and sure enough, that’s what it is. We wonder if Velasquez…
Read MoreWhen we chose plywood floors for the Laboratory, the idea was that we could paint them as needed. They’d start out an oyster white…and then go who knows where as they became worn or our mood changed. So we’re always on the lookout for cool painted floor ideas, like this one from an old station…
Read MoreWhen we stumbled on images of artist/designer Richard Woods‘ show D.I.Y at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London, we literally gasped. LOOK at those floors!. They turn out to be Woods’ trademark vibrantly-coloured and exaggerated wood-grain motif. …deceptively simple in form, these bold images are produced using traditional block-printing techniques and installed as parquetry (inlaying wood in geometric patterns)……
Read MoreThis image from Elle Decoration reminded us of the wonderful design of the ubiquitous tin can once it’s label is torn off. They really do make great vessels. Tin cans must be in the wind. Yesterday, we came across these zinc chic-ed up can vessels for sale at Anthropolgie.
Read MoreWe are big fans of outdoor rooms—outdoor spaces defined in such a way as to make them feel like rooms in plein air— and have featured a number of them over the years. (One of our favorites is the lovely outdoor “room” that Constantino Nivola created on his Long Island property.) We were smitten when we saw this…
Read MoreOver the years, just about every place we’ve lived has had hardwood floors. They’ve ranged from prewar bleached and polyeurathaned oak to white “pickled” new oak and lately, off-white, high-gloss painted slightly rough plywood. For all those years, we’ve searched for the best way to clean our floors without damaging the protective surface. Since New York…
Read MoreEver since seeing designer Max Lamb‘s polystyrene bookcases, we’ve been huge fans of his work. He loves making things and lends an artist’s eye to fine craftman’s projects, documenting each step of his process to share on his website. We’ve learned a huge amount from looking at Lamb’s projects, many of which are do-able by…
Read MoreAt Unconsumption, we came across this picture with commentary from a couple of different sites: the first via A Harsh Light: craigslist houseshare ad: “i have a garden growing in my shower so you have to use eco-friendly hair products. you will see worms and other insects, and you will occasionally see a spider too but they all…
Read MoreWe often take ideas from products that already exist, using a kind of x-ray vision to suss their inner workings and determine if we could make them ourselves. Danish company we do wood’s Scoreboarde, a graphic multifunctional rack for hanging coats and other things appears to be little more than hardwood boards with grids of…
Read MoreAutoprogettazione, roughly translated “self design,” was a project and book by the modernist artist and designer Enzo Mari that gives instructions for building easy-to-assemble furniture — tables, chairs, bookshelves, wardrobe — using rough boards and nails. Originally published in 1974, it has been reprinted many times. Mari created the project because he thought …if people were encouraged to…
Read MoreAt Design Milk, we came across these cool, full-of-possibilities “Chopped” tables by designer Yuval Tal. They’re made of packs of wooden towels strapped together with a metal ring — no screws or glue needed. We were mulling where to get metal strapping and how to get it tight enough to hold the dowels securely in place,…
Read MoreWe have a strange aversion to wall-to-wall carpeting, finding it monotonous, one dimensional and claustral. But when we saw this clever carpeting made of stripey colors, we though, yeah we might could live with that. Then we saw these stipes made out of floor tiles and realized the striped thing could be done with lots…
Read MoreA perfect impromtu side table, made from worn stacked boxes, each worn in a unique way as to contribute to a striped, graphical design. This is the kind of thing that salvage places are perfect for… via Japanese Trash Related posts: d-i-y vintage-box furniture (and obsession) dreaming of a rietveld crate desk cardboard, crates +…
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