Party Lights

May is one of our favorite months. The rainy seasons rapidly draws to a close which means plenty of warmth and sunshine which means we start to transition our lives outdoors. On top of that, it's also Alison's birthday month! This year we celebrated her 30th birthday with a 2-person yard party in our yard. But no yard party is complete without party lights, so we had to get to it!

We have modeled our house in the CAD program SketchUp which we use for most of our projects. It is helpful for designing and planning everything out and helps work out a lot of potential problems that can arise during construction/assembly/layout of whatever it is we're doing. And yes, we even used it to help us decide on party lights.  There are plenty of lights to choose from but we opted for these. We liked the spherical shape of them, the fact that they are LED, and also the spacing between bulbs (which is 2ft for this strand). There are some strands out there with 1ft spacing but after modeling it in SketchUp we realized how overkill that would end up being. We also used the CAD model to determine just how many feet of lights we would need. With a little bit of good design, and a lot of luck, our requirement came to 195ft, or almost exactly 2 strands.

While we we're able to use the fascia board on our house to anchor the lights, we needed a sway to hold up the lights on the far side of the yard. We looked around for something that was specifically designed for this purpose and didn't find anything. The best option we found on Amazon were 92" Shepard's hooks for $40. While not the worst solution in the world, we opted to make our own poles instead.

We had used electrical conduit in previous projects so we decided to start there. Electric Metallic Tube conduit is great as its quite strong and rigid but its also pretty darn cheap. A 3/4" tube that's 10ft long is just under $7 at the big box stores. The PVC version of the tubes are even cheaper. And though the PVC tubing might not be rigid enough to hole the lights up, it will make the perfect holder for our EMT tube.

We ended up with 1x 10ft PVC conduit with a 1" diameter. We needed 4 poles total to hold up all the lights so we cut the PVC conduit into 4 equal pieces at 2.5ft each. We marked out the location of where we wanted to place the poles, and pounded the PVC into the ground. If you have a rubber or plastic mallet, this would probably work great to do this. We just covered the PVC with a piece of scrap wood and pounded it with a standard hammer. We left around a foot or so of the PVC exposed above ground.

For each pole we used a 10ft EMT Conduit with a 3/4" diameter. We used an awl to poke a starter hole a few inches down from the top and finished the hole with a drill. Then you just have to screw in a little hook and you're all set! There are plenty of options for hooks and clasps so be creative and find something that looks good to you. You can also choose to find a cap for your conduit if you're so inclined. It will give the pole a bit of a cleaner look to it. We opted not to cap the poles. You can also choose to paint your conduit and now would be a good time to do it if you so choose. We decided not to but a little paint could definitely spruce it up a bit.

Now you just have to stick the EMT conduit into the PVC holders and you're all set. We had a bit of a lean to our poles to we ended up zip tying them to the fence to keep them more upright. Once this was done it was just a matter of stringing up the lights and plugging them in! We love these lights and they provide a ton of light. This whole project doesn't take more than an hour or so to do and the results of the lights are dramatic. We plugged our lights into a smart outlet and have them set to turn on in the evening and off before we go to bed which helps keep the party going every night!

Washing Machine Fire Pit

As the quarantine continues, it has been difficult to get out into the wilderness for extended periods of time. Normally this is our favorite time of year to wander into the woods and find a nice spot to pitch a tent and make it our home for the weekend. Since this seems to be out of the question for the foreseeable future, we decided to replicate the camping experience as much as possible right in our back yard. There was just one problem, we didn't have a (safe) way of building a campfire!


Some time last year we visited some friends who had a little patio with a nice little fire pit at the focal point. We were amazed by this little pit as it was surprisingly clean burning with little smoke to be constantly dodging. Maybe that's what we need for our backyard campground! I began looking for this fire pit only to be immediately sticker shocked. These smokeless fire pits are $200+ with some models reaching $650! As cool as they are, we can't afford nor justify dropping that much on a fire pit.

We decided to do a little research to figure out how these burned so cleanly. As it turns out, the concept is pretty simple. These fire pits promote air flow to stoke the flame allowing the wood to burn hotter which helps burn off some of the chemical compounds in the wood before they can become smoke. These expensive fire pits achieve this airflow with a set of holes on the bottom of the outside of the pit and another set of wholes on the inner ring of the enclosure near the top. This allows air to travel into the fire pit to keep the fire roaring.

Knowing this, we stumbled upon a design that would get us a hot burning fire with low cost, and best of all, uses upcylced parts destined for the scrap heap. Though perhaps not quite as elegant as the costly Solo Stove, the drum of a washing machine / dryer makes for a great solution! The drums inside of these machines are perfectly sized for back yard fire pits and come full of small hole that allow for plenty of airflow. Not only that, they are cheap or even free! Craigslist is scattered with old washers and dryers, commonly even being posted in the free section. Haul it away and remove the drum and just like that, you've got yourself a free high airflow fire pit. There are many designs for these around the internet like this one posted on Reddit by u/anthonlu/:

We found someone selling the drums already removed from the machines on our local Craigslist board and opted to shell out a few bucks to save our backs a bit of heavy lifting. What we ended up with was a 22" wide washing machine drum. We dug down about 1-1.5 ft into the ground, laid down a simple foundation of bricks, set the drum on top and filled in around the outside of the drum.

We got lucky with the size of our drum, too. It just so happens that the 22" diameter is the exact same as the grate from our Weber grill. With no modification, we can simply place the rack onto the lip of the drum and start cooking directly over the fire. Even the lid pops right on! We are now cooking as much as possible over our firepit / grill. We will soon be posting about our Campfire Pizza and Cast Iron Shrimp Tacos!

It works incredibly well! We've begun having camp fires several nights a week and are now able to achieve our camping goals right in our backyard. We loaded up on firewood (we found a local seller on Facebook marketplace and got it for cheap!) and got a simple rack to hold it all on Amazon (you can also build one yourself!).

Let us know about your adventures in urban camping and anything you've done to bring the great outdoors to your backyard!

Raised Garden Beds

Spring is here which means its time for our favorite hobby of all: Gardening! Having moved to our new house in January, the weather wasn't exactly prime to start cleaning up the yard, start landscaping, and build the garden, but now that it has warmed up we are getting everything built up!

When we moved in, there were a few old, painted, mostly dilapidated raised garden beds in the backyard. They clearly hadn't seen much love in quite some time as they were overrun and quickly returning to nature. It was time for them to go so we pulled them up and cleared the space for new ones.

As per usual with our outdoor projects, we chose to make our raised beds out of cedar. We love the way it looks and smells and best of all its natural resistance to decay and pests. Its a little bit more expensive than other lumber choices but we are hoping that it will last longer than something like pine. We also don't want the chemicals in pressure-treated wood anywhere near the plants that we will soon be ingesting.

Raised beds are great for many reasons such as pest control, soil control, warmer soil, and better drainage. They also happen to be easy to build and are relatively inexpensive. We decided to build two different size beds. The larger beds are 6' x 4' x 1'. We like to keep the short side to a maximum of 4 feet so that everywhere in the box is accessible from no more than 2 feet away. This saves awkward leaning and reaching while tending to the garden.

The smaller beds are 8' x 2' x 1'. We went with 2 foot beds as these boxes are placed up against a fence and won't be accessible from one side. This allows us to keep that maximum of 2' reach at any spot in the box. We're hoping to utilize the fence behind these boxes as a trellis to help some of our veggies and flowers grow.

This year we are trying something we've never attempted before which is Hoop Houses. These Hoop Houses act as a green house for individual beds. This is great to get started a bit earlier in the season and hopefully extend later into Fall as the plants are able to stay warmer than if they were uncovered. The design of the hoop houses is also quite simple. We simply took 2' pieces of rebar and hammered them about half way into the ground at each corner of the boxes. We then took an 8' piece of 3/4" PVC conduit and placed it over top of the exposed rebar. Make sure to get the grey electrical conduit as it offers more UV protection than the white PVC and is roughly the same cost. Then simply bend the conduit into a hoop and put the other end over the matching rebar stake. For a shorter hoop you can cut the conduit to a shorter length. We then added a cross bar at the top of each hoop for extra support.

Since we built some beds against a fence we simply placed the rebar staked on the front corners of the bed and also an additional one in the middle. We placed the conduit on the rebar and then cut them down and tied them to the top of the fence.

We experimented with placing the rebar stakes both inside the box and outside of the box. While both ways work just find, we found that going outside of the box not only looks a lot cleaner, but it saves space inside the box and makes it easier to open and close. In the picture above, the hoop house on the left has the stakes on the outside and the house on the right has stakes on the inside. Doing it again, we will definitely opt to keep them outside of the boxes.

For the plastic we went 6mil UV Treated Polyethylene from Amazon. We went with the 10' x 25' roll as it is is slightly wider than our conduit which minimized the amount of cutting we had to do to shape it.  Once cut to size, we draped it over the hoops and clip them into place with spring clamps.

We like to keep our hoop houses open whenever its possible to allow for the best sunlight and to let the pollinators do their work. It is also necessary to open them when its starts getting warmer outside. We also like to open them in the rain to cut down on the watering we have to do. We usually like to close them back up pretty quickly when raining though as it can still get pretty cool here in the spring.

There are all sorts of opportunities for unique raised bed, simple or elaborate, fun accessories, trellises and hoop houses. Be sure to let us know what you've done in your garden. We're always looking for fun new tricks to try and want to post your ideas for all to see!

Compost Bin

We are excited about our new home, but in order to even begin making the transition to homestead, we needed to get a few basics out of the way first. This project may not seem as glamorous as others, but it is one of the most important and, surprisingly, one of the most gratifying: The Compost Bin!

There are a swath of benefits to composting. We found that food scraps made up a large portion of our weekly trash which means we were able to save a few bucks by dropping to a smaller bin once we began composting. Turns out we're not alone; food scraps and other organic waste accounts for up to 50% of the average household trash. Instead of hauling that off to a landfill, those materials can be broken down into nutrient rich soil that your plants will love! A simple google search will reveal all the thousands of reasons of how composting is beneficial and extremely important to our environment so we'll leave that to the experts.

We don't have a ton of experience building things and were able to take this compost bin on without too much hassle. There are many designs out there ranging in size and complexity from 5-gallon buckets to designs Frank Gehry himself would be impressed by. We decided to go middle of the road with a relatively simple 2-Bin design.

We chose to use cedar for its natural resistance to pests and decay, its lack of chemical additions (looking at you pressure-treated wood), and we also happen to love the look of it. Cedar can be pretty pricey at big box stores, but we've found there are usually plenty of people selling it on Craigslist. Commonly you can find lumber yards with lower grade wood at a fraction of the cost, but you'll have to watch out for damaged lumber. We've found that even if we end up with a few bits of unusable material, its still a fraction of the cost of buying from a large store and often the wood can be used for other projects

With this design, we chose to use chicken wire to help contain the compost, while also allowing for air flow to help break everything down quickly. The chicken wire is cheaper than walling everything in with more cedar, but we've found that larger debris can get stuck in it (see the right side of our box; lesson learned, sticks were not a great choice for the bin...), which makes turning the pile a bit more difficult. Having had bins both ways, they're both perfectly acceptable and work great. If you decide to use chicken wire, we suggest attaching it before fully framing the rest of the bin to help cover the edges of the wire.

The frame of our bin is made of 2x4s with 4x4s as the main support pillars. We used deck screws to join the pieces and a staple gun to attach the chicken wire. We originally had made outward swinging doors on the front and upward swinging doors on the top to fully enclose the bins but have since removed them. We don't throw meat or dairy products into our bin and have found that rodents and other pests aren't much of an issue which was our original concern. Removing the doors makes using the bins that much easier and looks much cleaner too. As you can see in the pictures, we've slipped and let some weeds reap the benefits of our compost. We'll be sure to remove that to help save the nutrients for our veggies.

Each bin is roughly 3' x 3' x 3'. This seemed an appropriate size for the amount of compost we could handle. Having the second bin allows us to begin a new pile as the the first pile becomes more broken down and ready for use in the garden.

We hope you can see how it easy it is to build a compost bin and start reaping all the benefits of composting. This project is pretty simple and doesn't take more than a few hours. We would love to see any designs you have come up with as well so be sure to send us some pictures of yours and we will post them for everyone to see!