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Category: diy

the rat mansion: unveiled

  • August 3rd, 2012
  • 2

Whew! I promised in my last post that I would share a lot of goodies about the rats’ new cage when it was finished, and finally, after a month of work, it is. Like many of my projects, I thought it would be a quicker and easier process than it was, but I’m really pleased with the result–and more importantly, so are Ari and Vetty. Their old cage was perfectly nice, but not ideal–it never really looked like it belonged in our living room, they scattered food and bedding all over the floor, and we had to hide all their [...]

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rats are people too: interior design in miniature

  • July 26th, 2012
  • 2

I’m Kate Moore, and I love rats. Still with me? Good. That sentence carries a bit of a stigma. When I tell people about my beloved pet rats, reactions range from the disgusted (“Ugh! Why would you bring a rat into your house?!?”) to the politely baffled (“Rats? You mean…like actual rats?”) to the downright mean. Only very occasionally will I get a positive response, and I cling to those people like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth. The thing is, most of these people haven’t ever met a pet rat. Fancy rats, as they’re called (meaning “bred [...]

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oh, the life of a cat: diy outdoor lounge for a spoiled beast

  • June 11th, 2012
  • 0

How about this weather, Midwest? It’s been gorgeous, although the drought has put a damper on things a bit (fortunately it gave us a nice big storm today). Our garden has been soaking up the summer sun and giving us outrageous amounts of zucchini, a few handfuls of edamame, a nice crop of watermelon radishes, countless herbs, and around 20 not-yet-ripe-but-starting-to-look-delicious tomatoes. Between the garden’s generous production and our Bounty Box subscription (a local grocer, the Root Cellar, provides us with a big box of local and seasonal produce every week), we haven’t needed much else in the way of [...]

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container gardening for the lazy

  • April 15th, 2012
  • 0

For the last few years, every spring Jimmy and I have tried to plant a vegetable garden. We have had varying degrees of success with this. Two years ago, knowing very little about gardening but wanting the Earth Mothery feeling of digging around in the dirt with my hands, we bought a bunch of terra cotta pots, filled them with potting soil, and planted some seeds from the hardware store creatively labeled with names like “EGGPLANT” and “ZUCCHINI.” As our stunted, wispy seedlings grew into stunted, wispy plants, I glanced at the potting soil bag and noticed in big letters [...]

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spray, girl, spray: paint makes everything better

  • February 23rd, 2012
  • 1

(The title of this post is for my dear friend Emily, who greets me with a Tila Tequila-ish “hey girl heyyyyyy” now and then.) I’ve been feeling the DIY urge pretty strongly lately, but at the moment I don’t have much to apply it to. February is a very, very slow month for me on Etsy, historically, so our budget has been pretty tight; thus, projects like building a DVD rack for the alcove or re-renovating the master bathroom have been put temporarily on hold. For the moment, I’m limited to projects that are either cheap or free. Fortunately, I [...]

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cruelty-free floor: budget friendly diy faux cowhide rug

  • February 7th, 2012
  • 10

Lately I’ve been working so much on the Etsy store, and on the various friends’ weddings I’ve been designing for, that I haven’t paid much attention to the house. Until last night. I arrived back home from a long weekend in Chicago with a carful of IKEA furniture, tingly-numb legs, and a burning desire to finish the alcove project. Specifically, I wanted to finish the rug. If you’ll recall, I wanted to do some kind of faux-pony (fauxny?) or cowhide rug, but obviously not something from a real animal. The look I was going for was this: Of course, as [...]

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new year, tiny space, big plans

  • January 3rd, 2012
  • 1

Sorry for the wait, kids. I’ve been trying to write a post about the myriad projects I put together for Christmas for a week now, and I just cannot for the life of me find the transfer cable for my camera. I know it’s somewhere in the nightmare pit I currently call my office, so as soon as I get it squared away I’ll have the deets on all my family’s gifts. Suffice to say that in the two weeks before Christmas, I crocheted a scarf, made a quilt, decoupaged photos onto fourteen canvases, made four yarn wreaths, infused and [...]

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i can’t think of a pun on “chair”

  • November 29th, 2011
  • 1

Finally, finally, after hours of watching my MacBook search through unallocated space (which falls just below watching grass grow and just above watching Jersey Shore on my scale of exciting things to do) I managed to recover the photos of the chair redo that I so foolishly deleted last time. After looking at the handful of pictures my scattered brain remembered to take, I’m not sure those hours were very well-spent, but eh. They’re here. There are myriad tutorials out there on how to do a simple reupholstery job like this one; you can probably find much, much better instructions [...]

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aagghhhhhh

  • November 18th, 2011
  • 3

Oh man. I was all rarin’ to go on a big old post today. I was gonna teach you how to reupholster dining chairs, because mine are done and they look so awesome I think I can basically consider myself an authority on the subject (or at least on how to half-ass it). I was copying all the photos off my camera onto my hard drive, which was eight photos of the reupholstery process and approximately nineteen photos of myself wearing pink lipstick and trying to find “my good side.” Spoiler alert: I didn’t find it. Anyway, I got distracted [...]

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christmas footprint (bootprint?)

  • November 9th, 2011
  • 1

So I try not to even think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving, because I really like Thanksgiving–lots of food, you hang out with your family, but no pressure to give/receive gifts and not many songs (which are festive and exciting for like a week and then just aggravating). The thing is, due to limited financial resources and a tendency to obsess about things, I usually make most of the presents we give away. Sometimes this backfires (Dad, I PROMISE you I will finish that damn scarf–enjoy it because I’m never making another one), but normally I feel like it lets [...]

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