DIY Life

Everything is expensive nowadays, and let's face it -- a summer vacation just may not be in your budget this year. You don't have to sacrifice family fun just because you can't get away, though; instead, follow my tips for a frugal staycation filled with old favorites and new adventures!

Come on in -- the water's fine!
No staycation would be complete without a day at the beach or pool, and you've got lots of cheap options.

• Got a friend with a pool? Bum a visit, and bring burgers and hot dogs for everyone. You've done your share -- and gotten a free day of swimming.
• Find a state park (here's a list of all U.S. state parks) with a lake and beach. They are usually only about US $5 per car; they often have BBQ pits so you can cook your own meals, and you could even rent a canoe.
• If you live in the mountains, you can probably pull over to the side of the road and frolic in the rocky river for the day, like we do when we visit New Hampshire. That's free, folks!
• Living near the ocean is quite a perk, and can cost anywhere from free to about US $20 per car. If you are coastal, you've got to take advantage!

I have always loved giving photographs as gifts. In my young and single days, I'd elegantly frame my own photographs of landscapes, flowers, or architecture. Now, people get pictures of my kid. He's pretty cute, so it works out on all fronts, but I think the gift is most appreciated when the photograph comes with a classy frame, made by you.

Every Dad needs pictures of his kids at the office, right? For this cute "Dad" frame, all you need is some oaktag or poster board, scissors and glue. The holes in the letters D-A-D frame photos of your kids -- cute! Martha Stewart has a similar project with a template for the D-A-D.

A rustic photo frame made from twigs can go with just about any decor, from country to modern. Using twigs, twine and a little glue, you can make one is a few short minutes. You could frame your child, but this type of frame would also look nice around a woodland landscape that is somehow meaningful to the recipient.

Using a old computer keyboard you can make a thin sleeve to protect your CD or DVD from damage. Inside computer keyboards is a thin, flexible, and sturdy membrane with printed circuits on it. Older keyboards tend to have prettier colors and designs in my experience. If you have upgraded to a USB keyboard or one with a bunch of fancy function keys and can not find a taker for your old keyboard grab a small screwdriver and see what's inside.

Making a few sleeves like this could be combined to make a CD wallet. Adding a "jacket" made from an old 5¼ inch floppy diskette gives the newer disc even more protection and also makes your CD protection quite similar to the old familiar albums.

There is a contingent of the gadget-obsessed among us who love their toys, but prefer to conserve cash every month (it seems) when the "latest and greatest" gadget comes out for public purchase. Instead of buying all that new garb and abandoning that perfectly working gadget from last month (heh), why not re-purpose some of those gadgets with a little elbow grease and finesse and give them the working life they really have inside?

A great example is the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) that turns your five year-old original Xbox into a fully-featured internet and home computer network media server. Wanna view YouTube videos, listen to your MP3 collection or browse RSS feeds? You can.

Don't toss that old iPod either. There are plenty of utilities to make that again music gadget useful for other things. Have a plain vanilla Linksys WRT54G wireless router? Install the open-source DD-WRT firmware and get options and features normally found on expensive routers only. I've performed this upgrade and turned that lousy Linksys user interface into a stunning new interface with many more options (which are much easier to use). No need for that $100 draft-n router, right? Well, not yet, anyway.

Now, in the olden days of, say, the 1980s, we thought a La-Z-Boy recliner was the height of indulgent relaxation. No longer. Now you've got your specialty home theater seating, meaning super-adjustable, huge, comfortable theater-style loungers complete with cup holders. Mmm. Comfort. And a mere $1,499.99 for a three-seat set of leather loungers. Yikes! Oh, and check this out for the ultimate in lavish living. At the other end of the spectrum, though, are budget-conscious DIY makeovers like this one for under $500, proving you don't have to be super-wealthy like Tony Soprano to theater-it-up. (Remember those episodes where he installed a home theater in the downstairs den, complete with an old-timey popcorn machine?)

Thinking of taking the plunge? The home improvement website Home Time has a really useful feature on home theater planning. It covers everything you'll need to consider, like the space you'll need and even suggested room layouts, to maximize your viewing pleasure. Need inspiration? Visit Projector Central for tons of makeover pics.

My husband has bins of random old computer parts, and I've begged him repeatedly to get rid of them. He has always said that you can never be sure when you might need one of those parts. I'm sure he's got useless stuff in there, though, like maybe a broken CD drive. Who needs that kind of junk? Well, apparently a broken CD drive isn't necessarily junk after all.

This instructables tutorial teaches us how to make a USB cooling fan for a notebook with a old CD drive. If you've got a bin like ours, you probably already have everything you need for this project.

If you're a DVD freak, you probably have a wall dedicated somewhere in your home to all those movie discs. There's a reason those black plastic cases that house DVDs are called "keep cases." That is, you have to keep them -- and they pile up over time creating a storage nightmare for many of you in apartments and so forth.

Although I tossed most of my keep cases years ago, the organization part still eludes me a bit. This DVD owner went a step beyond normal DVD storage optimization and used those nicer, felt-lined disc sleeves along with a tabbed, alphabetical filing system to keep track of what appears to be an immense DVD collection. We should all be so lucky.

Anyhoo, if you're looking to take back a bedroom wall in your home that is littered with DVDs that you own, you owe it to yourself to check out this storage solution. It lets you keep those DVD printed inserts as well (well, with a little trimming) and allows you massive DVD storage that can fit under your bed or in a small cabinet. Neat!

We want to raise kids with a DIY attitude, but in the interest of order we take on so much of their personal management and leave them to just follow orders. Authority over our own time is one of the most empowering things we can have. When we're calling the shots, we make better choices, use our time most effectively and end up feeling better about the decisions we make. Children are no different.

Those marvelous Mealeys introduced our family to the idea of TV tickets. Each week they give their children tickets worth 30 minutes of television each. The children choose when and how they spend the tickets. They even give the children a choice of saving tickets and converting them into book cash, where they can have a dollar towards a book for each unused ticket.

Follow me through the break and I'll share a bit about the modified system we're working at our house.

Question: what's worse than ruining a CD or DVD with a nice, deep scratch? Answer: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Instead of breaking down and sobbing hysterically beneath your cubicle for three hours, like you did last time, check out this DIY disc repair article from Wise Bread. The author did a good job collecting videos for each method of scratch removal, but beware of the second one under the toothpaste version... trust me. So, here's how Wise Bread breaks things down:

Toothpaste - (effectiveness: 3/5) - Squirt some toothpaste on the data side of your disc, gently smear the toothpaste over the entire disc using your fingers to make small circular motions, let the toothpaste sit on the disc for a few minutes, carefully rinse the paste off with lukewarm water, and then gently dry the disc with a soft rag or t-shirt. Wise Bread's take: "The toothpaste did indeed help with some scratches but only very small ones. The deeper scratches were unaffected. On another note, my CDs now smell minty!"

Banana - (effectiveness: 2/5) - Peel a banana, smear it on the data side of your scratched disc, and then wipe it clean. Quick, wasteful, and generally ineffective. Wise Bread's take: "Not quite as good as the toothpaste, but it did help with a few tracks that had skipped. It's a lot more messy though, and a waste of a good banana."

CD/DVD drives sometimes misbehave. If you are laughing, you know that it's true. They also produce one of the common error messages your computer can give you that just doesn't make sense to most of us. What in the world is "buffer overrun error" for example? Geeks will tell you that this means the data didn't quite make it onto the CD because such-and-such, or thus-and-so happened, all you know is that it didn't work, plain and simple.

Fine, so now your drive is stuck in its ticked-off position, and you can't get the blasted disc out of the drive? If you just tried restarting your computer, congratulations, that is the best thing to try if your drive is acting up. If that doesn't fix it, there is an easy fix. It is time to get a little invasive.