Do a DIY home decor project.

“So happy I finally did this. This was the first thing I envisioned for the house before I even got the keys last summer (AI renders at the end). I started painting on NYE and loved the color, but it clearly needed plants and the original 3” ledge wasn’t cutting it. Bad luck turned good: after flooding my main floor, I had leftover planks from the replacement and realized they’d make the perfect ledge. To make it look right, I ended up building out the entire ledge wall. Another lucky break: the flooring crew had to fix a misaligned stair runner mid-project and were able to shift the landing 3” so everything lined up. Wouldn’t have noticed until it was too late. Not totally finished yet (baseboard going back on, wood filler + caulk), but I’m really happy with how it turned out.”

“Within hours of buying our house in 2016, we started making it our own. We painted walls, patched some drywall nail holes and came up with tons of other things to change over the years. It was a deep learning experience because we had never done any of it before. Sure, we’d painted decor for parties and weddings, but not entire rooms before. After a couple of months of painting and drywall repair, I was tired of fixing things. Freshly married and new home owners left little in the budget for things we didn’t need, but we wanted a hook for our keys and dog leash. Something finally clicked and I remembered those YouTube Maker videos I had seen over a year before. I decided to make a simple key hook out of some cheap pine boards we found at a big box store. I won’t lie and say it was the most amazing thing ever built. In fact, it wasn’t square, the finish , and the hooks come out the back (and it took me a week to complete…). But I still keep it because it was the first thing I ever made that we designed ourselves.”