How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Open Floor Plan

March 28, 2018

Design

...ining room. And the two closets that share a wall between the two bedrooms used to be one big closet with a window. The window is visible from the outside but plugged up on the inside. I’m pretty sure that the house we live in was a kit offered by the Pacific Ready Cut company. Style #48 in the 1925 Pacific Ready-Cut catalog closely resembles our floor plan with the dining room and living room flipped and the closet in a different orientation. We...

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Our new front yard, part 2: theory

Mrs. Homegrown

November 13, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

12 Comments

...mage courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons) The concept of legibility One term used by Rainer and West in Planting in a Post-Wild World that I really glommed onto was “legibility.” Landscapes have to be legible to be likeable. The Western world has an inherited bias toward open landscapes with clean edges. In its simplest incarnation, a lawn with a tree. The driveway and the clipped hedge. The golf course. This may be an aesthetic inheritance of those...

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What the Internet Will Look Like After the Zombie Apocalypse

Mr. Homegrown

February 27, 2014

Water and Power

...net (though you could route the internet over it). Such a network could be used in an emergency such as an earthquake or weather event to send digital messages. It’s also the means by which I could continue to send out cute cat photos even if things go full-on Cormac McCarthy You could use this same hack, not exactly legally, to solve networking problems in a large house, business or rural property. And the same method has been used to set up data...

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Cat Scratch Fever: How to Make Your Own Cat Scratching Posts

Mr. Homegrown

January 28, 2016

Animals, Cats

15 Comments

...our Ikea couch. Here’s what you’ll need: 3/8 inch sisal rope scrap wood (I used a 4×4) [I have revised this post: nails work better than staples!] #17 x 1 inch wire nails hot glue (optional, but a few dabs will keep the sisal on the post longer) Wrapping the wood is straightforwards, if tedious. I used some clamps to hold the post down to my work bench while I did the wrapping. Put a few nails in the sisal as you begin to wrap it around the wood....

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I Spent 11 Months Building an Uncomfortable Couch

Mr. Homegrown

August 29, 2022

Design

5 Comments

...tenon joints. We also had to figure out how to do the curved top rail. We used quartersawn white oak, the same wood that Stickley used for most of his furniture. Manny at Custom Designs Upholstery in Pasadena did the cushion. I’m very pleased with the end result and thankful to have a wood shop. The divan has decadent 1900 vibes, kind of the perfect couch to faint on after too many rounds of absinthe consumed while your significant other plays th...

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