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Laminant Stairs Upgrade
Quarantine 2020 has turned into Home Renovation Quarantine for the Kleiber’s. We replaced our entire second floor carpeting with laminant flooring. Then we were faced with the dillema of what to do with the remainig front and back stairs. The front curved staircase , pictured below was tiled (see link for project details). I really like how the front tile staircase turned out but it was labor intensive and a bit expensive for our backstairs. So we agreed that laminant stairs was a good option, using the same material we had used on the upstairs flooring. Here’s how the second floor laminant looks: Backstairs: Step 1 – Start…
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Smokey Baked Beans
These beans are great served with smoked meats and potato salad. To make vegan/vegetarian, omit the bacon. There’s so much flavor in these beans, removing the bacon barely affects the overall taste. Most of the flavor comes from smoking the beans for several hours in a smoker. No smoker? Consider soaking some mesquite or applewood chips and adding them to your BBQ. Another option would be to add some liquid smoke and simmer indoors over the stove for 3 to 4 hours. It won’t be quite the same but similar. I’ve taken them to many big group BBQ’s and they are always a hit. While this is a recipe…
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Modern Bohemian Headboard made with Shims
After replacing all the flooring in my upstairs, I was looking to update my guest bedroom decor. I found a few modern wood patterned headboard styles on Wayfair but they are really expensive, so when I ran across a project using wood shims to create a serving tray, I came up with a similar design but on a larger scale. Step 1 ~ Decide on your base material, this will not show but needs to be strong enough to hold up to the weight of the headboard. I would recommend OSB (oriented strand board), but you could use plywood or particle board. Start by measuring and cutting the base. Full…
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New Dock Build
Building a new dock from scratch was a lot of work but well worth the money saved and time spent. My husband and I did a lot of research prior to starting this project. This dock is on a Texas lake that is not a constant level lake, which is why we planned an attached in ground walk way with moving walk plank out to the floating dock. Step 1 – In ground walk way Without heavy machinery and the fact we lacked welding experience and equipment, we decided on securing the posts with 4 inch PVC pipes, with a center 1 inch metal pipe. These were pounded into the…
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Staircase MakeOver
My front curved staircase is the first thing you see when entering my home. The staircase was the reason I fell in love with my house initially but keeping carpeted stairs cleaned and vacuumed was a giant frustration. After looking into replacing with wood, I decided on tile. A hardwood replacement would have been far more expensive and required additional tools. I wanted to create a statement look and love Spanish tile detail. There are a lot of options for tile, but in the end I didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on high end tile for the stairs. I ended up buying my black and white tiles from…
