DIY Life

I did a bit of house shopping this week and found a lovely bungalow style home, but it was soooo tiny. I suppose if I was an optimist, I'd call it "cozy", but the truth is (and there's no hiding behind the truth, is there?) -- it was just small. Luckily, the low ceilings and minimal square footage won't deter me... especially after I watched this video from AOL's interior design expert Kelly Edwards.


Want more great ideas for maximizing small square footage or making the most out of small homes, spaces and nook? Here's the best tip of all: Get creative. You can often work with what you've got by thinking out of the [very small] box.

Try transforming a closet into an office, a pantry into a playroom... or even a garage into a man-friendly den/cave. It's all in the space planning, and don't be afraid to do something out of the ordinary. Your reward will be more space to work with, and storage solutions you'll actually use!

Get to work!

I'm planning a baby shower for a friend at the moment, and she's not your average mother-to-be. I've been instructed not to include storks, diapers or baby bottles, as the occasion should be feminine, but not exaggerated. As I brainstormed color schemes and DIY favors, my mind instantly thought of these adorable DIY wedding favors and invitations, which are perfect for my friend.

My favorite invitations idea is to send a notebook with the occasion details and RSVP info, including a note asking the guest to fill out their predictions for the happy couple. I'd love to use this as a baby shower idea and ask guests to include their best advice for parenting, fun baby names and predictions for the birth.

Best part? You can turn the notebooks into one heck of a scrapbook and gift it to the bride-to-be or mother-to-be when the shower is completed. A DIY from start to finish, and the guest of honor will be floored at the personal touch.

For more great shower planning ideas, check out our friends at Holidash!

Weddings... it is so easy to get caught up in the moment. After all, your big day is pretty important, right? Agreed, but instead of being stressed over the planning, it makes sense to me to keep it simple and enjoy every moment leading up to your wedding as well.

Zen Habits has thirteen tips to hep you do just that: keep your wedding plans as simple as possible. They make a disclaimer, though, stating that if you want a traditional wedding that you probably still will have some stress. Their sensible tips are to help alleviate some of the needless worrying, so after the break I'll share some of their ideas.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I started cinching up quite a few important and final details before the big day came -- August 3, 2007. Among the areas I covered included wine and champagne amount calculations (yes, there's a formula for this), wedding program finalization and printing, deejay preparation and reception presentation picture scanning.

This week will feature a decent amount of wrap-up before I complete the Wedstravaganza series with next week's Part 8, which I hope to have to you on the ever-spooky day of Halloween. I hope you've enjoyed the ride thus far, and I hope you can appreciate the level of planning and detail that goes into a wedding and reception. I'll cover the honeymoon in next week's finale, as I've held off on that until now.

Additionally, next week's finale will include a timeline, a cost breakdown and the ending of our special day to our chosen Honeymoon destination the very next morning after Marci and I were married. So, don't forget to check back! Until then, continue reading.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I took you through a virtual cornucopia of meal selections, RSVP count updates, cake styles and selections, reception ballroom pictures, and photographer choices. We're now at week six of the eight-part series, so I'm going to attempt to wind up many events in this edition, and prepare you for what my final wedding day looked like and how everything came together.

After deciding to rent a projection system from our chosen wedding place, Marci and I set ourselves on a mission to locate a bunch of old photographs. You know, those yellow, 1970s-era (oops, I let me age slip there, heh) Polaroids and crusty images found spread amongst photo albums from family members on both sides.

Marci's mom and dad obliged with over six albums full of pictures from infant age through college, and my parents did the same. In fact, we had so many pictures at our choosing that it was hard to pick out 150 images or so that would work for the final reception presentation.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered creation and use of the wedding website as a planning aid for those too-close wedding dates, visiting Target and Dillards for the wedding registries, creating the wedding program, choosing a place for the rehearsal dinner, and selection of a minister to perform the actual ceremony. Those were some pretty large projects to tackle and get finalized, but ya gotta do 'em, right?

This week, I'll tackle some pretty important projects that allowed my wife and I to really pull a nice wedding together in only five weeks. We wanted to make our day very special even with a severe planning time crunch, so with all the planning paying off by week three of the five-week period, we decided to find a nice frame at a local Hobby Lobby store and have a 5x7 insert cut out so we could eventually place a black & white wedding photo there.

Until that time, we planted a family image in there and planned on having the glass removed so that wedding invitees could sign the backer board (with the five-pack of Sharpies we invested in) with well wishes. The photo above contains only a few, but by the wedding night, the entire frame was covered with signatures and wishes for our new family. It was, in a word, one of the neatest treasures from that special evening. In one fell swoop, we had this project done, so we put it aside until the wedding night came. Date: July 18th, 2007.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered tuxedo rentals for the guys, cake topper and table favor ordering, wedding colors, and flower picks. As we move into week four, I'll be talking about the wedding program I created, along with creating our wedding registries, wedding website (more on that later), and finding a place to hold the rehearsal dinner. Yes, the work continues, as we're only about halfway through the five-week journey it took to go from proposal to marriage. Strap in for the ride, 'cause here we go again.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered the very beginning of my recent 'race' to prepare and execute the perfect wedding in just five weeks. My wife and I ended up pulling everything off, much to the delight of our guests and ourselves. Our honeymoon included some much-needed relaxation time for seven days, but before we get ahead of ourselves, there are more -- much more -- basics to be covered. Well, basics may be a misnomer of sorts, as hardly anything in the preparation of a wedding could be described as 'basic.'

Starting off where I left off last week, our invitations went off within three days of ordering them, which ended up being perfectly timed. Alas, we gave our guests about four weeks notice of our wedding, which seemed an appropriate amount of time. Nobody -- at the time -- knew that we'd just began preparations for the wedding a few days earlier, but we weren't about to spill the beans just yet.

The next step in planning our wedding was squaring away the tuxedo rentals. With eight men to get measured and lined up, we headed to Tuxedo Junction at a location near our area. The tuxes were reserved on the day we ordered our invitations, so now was the time to notify all seven guys that they would have to drag, push and pull themselves to the tuxedo rental location to have measurements and show sizes taken.

There are few things as stressful as planning a big wedding. With so many details and so many egos, feelings often get trampled and resentments easily arise. One of the most likely individuals to reach an emotional boiling point during wedding planning is the bride. So often a blushing bride turns into a ranting, raving woman desperate to get every detail perfect for her special day. Somewhere during the planning process she becomes a Bridezilla; a woman who many fear and go to great lengths to avoid.

So how can you stop from morphing into this angry woman? Below area few thoughts to keep in mind as you make plans for your special day. Keep in mind that they are not sure thing, but if followed they might bring you some peace during this hectic time.

I recently unearthed an old book of mine: '666 Science Tricks & Experiments' by Bob Brown. Dated from the 70's, it is a compilation of Bob's 'Science for You' series in the LA Times and syndicated elsewhere. Well some of the gems in here aren't just tricks, but fully functional objects you might find useful for DIY projects. For example, one of those wheels for measuring distances in a field.

The trick is to just make a wheel of the proper diameter so that one full revolution will equal whatever unit you wish to measure. In Bob's article, he uses a wheel of 11.46 inches in diameter. One full revolution works out to a yard. This particular measuring device is perfect for marking football fields.

Now take the 11.46" diameter wheel, put it at the end of a stick so it can rotate, and mark a big spot somewhere so you can easily see and count the revolutions. You can get fancy with this basic premise, adding a clicker to hear the revs, or even an optical encoder to count it all digitally. Getting really fancy would involve gears and math so you could measure other distances with one wheel. But It's really just easier to calculate the circumference using our old friend Pi*d.

If you've ever bought a planner, you know that the inexpensive ones often come with badly-designed pages and a bunch of things you don't need, and the ones you can customize tend to be on the pricey side; then it's easy to neglect to use them, because they're inconvenient to lug around. Some people use their PDAs or similar integrated cellphone functions in place of a big brick of paper, but many still prefer to keep track of contacts and appointments with a paper and pen.

In the last few years, there has been a trend in geekland: handmade planners tailored to their owners' needs. The simplest of these is the "Hipster PDA," a stack of index cards secured with a binder clip or elastic band, or kept in a small card carrier, popularized by Merlin Mann on his site 43 Folders. But if you want something more complex, or you would like formal templates for your cards, you should check out the DIY Planner.

The DIY Planner site offers free downloads of printable planner pages, templates for making your own, and a beginner's guide to help you get started. The pages come in various sizes, including 3"x5" and half-letter (the classic size for planners in the US), and you only need to use the ones that work for you. In some formats, there are well over 100 options. Be sure to visit the rest of the site, too: it's full of information about journaling and taking notes, and has an active forum.