Read Bungalow Magazine and The Craftsman Online

...and less Apollonian than The Craftsman. What both publications have in common is an expectation that the reader is not just a consumer but potentially someone capable of taking up a chisel or sewing needle and making something. This DIY ethos was, of course, part of the anti-industrial agenda of the Arts and Crafts movement. One can hope that this spirit will catch on again in our disposable age. Save...

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We Grew a Cocktail Avocado!

This morning Kelly alerted me to the latest avocado news making its way around the internet tubes. Apparently a chain of grocery stores in Great Britain, worried about the lack of knife skills in our young folks (ugh), is marketing a seedless “cocktail” avocado. What is a cocktail avocado? Some deep Googling revealed that they aren’t some new variety, just un- or under pollinated Fuerte avocado. Since we have a Fuerte tree in our backyard, I deci...

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How to Build Walls with Pallets

...by Ron S. But pallets can be tough to work with. The wood splinters easily making disassembly a tricky proposition (watch the Garden Fork TV pallet breaker video if you want to go down that route). Famed internet pallet guru Michael Janzen, of Tiny Pallet House, proposes leaving your pallets whole and adding a 2×4 to the end to make them into a kind of building block. The 2x4s can be new or salvaged from broken pallets. With the added 2×4 you can...

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Saturday Tweets: Beet Raisins, Seed Libraries and a Pepperoni Disaster

...elSurls) April 6, 2018 Eric Garcetti can’t be a ‘climate mayor’ while he’s making more room for cars https://t.co/sg9Uf83izf — BikeLA (@Bike_LA) April 6, 2018 "Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf." — Lewis Mumford pic.twitter.com/7yd0JGil4B — Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) May 4, 2016 Waze has turned the nearly undriveable, fifth-steepest hill in America into a disaster-strewn major thoroughfare https://t.co/OogoX0a5cb — Root Simple (@roo...

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

In a stunning bit of hypocrisy, we’re busy making the floor plan of our house a bit more open in spite of our rants and raves about the practice. Allow me to explain. Many years ago, when I installed our living room floor, I pulled up a baseboard and discovered that the wall between the living room and bedroom was of recent vintage. What we now use as a bedroom was originally a sitting room or dining room. And the two closets that share a wall be...

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