How to Make a Hexagonal Raised Bed

...ine that supplied the clay for our adobe oven. Our landscaper has proposed making this part of our yard a rain garden. More on that project later in the year. One disadvantage of beds with this odd shape is that they are harder to critter-proof. I don’t consider this a deal killer, but it’s something to think about if you have the hoards of marauding mammals that nightly assault our backyard even in this very urban part of Los Angeles. You can see...

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Mortise and Tenon Magazine

...ars ago I decided to declutter some of my eclectic interests (goodbye beer making) and focus on upping my carpentry and woodworking skills. Partly, this was out of necessity. Our house needed some work and those skilled with planes and hammers are busy building custom staircases for Barbara Streisand and don’t have the time for a 980 square foot bungalow in the HaFoSaFo district. I took a few classes, subscribed to some woodworking and home buildi...

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Saturday Tweets: Too Many Tweets!

...PG56m0hpdU — Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) March 4, 2019 Alias: a smart-speaker "parasite" that blocks your speaker's sensors until you activate it https://t.co/uvSQXWz9kK — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 4, 2019 Goodbye Sidewalk Trees https://t.co/6MmMq42ay7 — Benjamin Vogt (@BRVogt) March 3, 2019 Haha. Our neighbours just accidentally connected the porn film they were watching to one of our Bluetooth speakers. — Jonathan Healey (@SocialHi...

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Bottom-up Urbanism

...tal property. Johnny describes himself as a “rodent who scurries about finding the opportunities other don’t recognize.” A lot of the things he talks about in the video are things we’ve done in our own very small Los Angeles house, such as adding sheds and making the garage space usable, all strategies for getting by on the expensive West Coast. The video even includes a bonus visit to a Murphy bed manufacturer. You can follow Johnny on his blog G...

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A Better Garage Organizational System

...anges to the workshop I made in order to make it more useful for furniture making such as being sure that I could access my workbench from all sides, as well as improvements to the dust collection system. I can detail these changes in a future post but I’m more interested in showing that a well organized workshop can benefit any activity from sewing to gardening. Taking the time to plan a workspace makes work go much easier. Aesthetics are importa...

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