If you have an unfinished basement, a garage or a storage shed, you can store much more in it if you have shelves. Built-in shelves are great, but if you’re renting or want the flexibility to rearrange the shelving units, you might want to make some free-standing shelves. Here’s a simple method for building some inexpensive storage shelves — and you can build them without power tools.

Materials to make two shelving units:

• 1 1/2-inch-thick sheet of plywood or oriented strand board (OSB). A full sheet is 4-feet-by-8-feet. Cost: about $7.50
• 16 8-foot 2-by-4s. Cost: $1.85 x 16 = $29.60
• 5 pounds of 3-inch deck screws. Cost: $28.24. You could probably find cheaper screws.

Process:

1) Cut the 4-foot-by-8-foot sheet of plywood or OSB into six pieces that are 4 feet by 16 inches. This requires five cuts. The lumberyard or building center might cut the plywood for you if you don’t have a power saw. Accounting for the width of the saw blade, these pieces will be slightly less than 16 inches wide.

2) Cut 12 pieces of 2-by-4 to 13 inches.

3) Cut six of the 2-by-4s in half. These will be slightly less than 48 inches.

4) Make six frames for the shelves. Put the 13-inch pieces between the ends of the 48-inch pieces and join each corner with two screws.

5) Attach the plywood pieces to the tops of the shelf frames with screws — two on each long side at least, more if you’d like. Note that the OSB will likely have a smooth side and a rough side. Keep this in mind as you attach it to the frames. Either side will work — this is only personal preference.

6) Attach an 8-foot 2-by-4 to each corner of the shelves, three shelves per unit. Use two or three screws per joint. You can pick a height for each shelf that works for you. Try to keep the shelves as level as possible.

7) Set the shelves in place.

Tips:

• For safety, attach at least one corner leg to a ceiling joist or something secure to stabilize the unit.
• If the shelving units aren’t perfectly level, you can use shims to level them — or use the method for leveling a table from Build Your Own Table (scroll down to “Make Your Table Stable”).
• The legs can be shorter than 8 feet. You might want to trim these to fit your space. I cut 13 inches from each and used those pieces for the frames, so I had longer leftover pieces.

Bicycle riding is popular all over the country in rural, suburban and urban settings. More and more cities are recognizing the need for bike lanes and special bike paths to accommodate the growing number of cyclists.

But on occasion, there is not a safe place to ride in your community or you would like to take your bikes on the road, so to speak. In which case, you may have need of a bike rack to transport your cycle. Sure, you can buy a ready-made rooftop bike carrier, but why not save a little dough and fabricate one yourself? A bicycle is a sustainable mode of transportation and making your own bike rack from scrap material is just part of a sustainable lifestyle.

Part of the joy of owning farm animals – chickens, goats, pigs or cows – is the daily (or twice daily) ritual of feeding them. For some portion of the year, most animals need some supplemental feed in addition to the grass, bugs and other natural edibles they routinely forage for. But, short of using a motorized conveyance, such as a utility vehicle, transporting the feed from its storage area to the hungry critters can be a challenge. It’s hard on the back to heft 50-pound, economy sized bags of feed onto your shoulder and carry it out to the waiting hoard.

Using a wheeled cart to move the feed would make the process much easier. The one pictured here is fabricated from a 50-gallon drum with two motorcycle wheels in the back and a large caster wheel in the front. The hinged lid protects the feed from rain and invasion by the hungry hoard. With a bit of scrounging and some welding work, you can make this convenient and practical “no-nonsense feed cart.”

Heating your home with a wood-fired stove or furnace can be a great way to cut down on gas or electric heating costs. But the process of getting the firewood for the stove is not always an easy task. You could choose to have the wood delivered to you split and ready to go; but this will no doubt cost almost as much as heating the conventional way.

To really save money by using wood heat, you need to gather, cut and split some, if not all, of the wood yourself. This requires an investment in equipment — chainsaw, sawbuck, hardhat, ear protectors and perhaps a log lifter to raise heavy, long logs off the ground for easier and safer cutting. To save even more money, you might consider fabricating the log lifter in your home shop. If you don’t know how to weld, this might make a great project to learn the basic skills. Some community colleges offer welding classes or you might find a local welding shop that is willing to teach you how.

If you make this log lifter or if you have fabricated other logging equipment, tell us about it in the comments section, below.

Summer is over, so many of you may be thinking of projects that didn’t get done during nice weather: expanding the vegetable garden, repairing the front porch steps or even building a backyard deck.

But don’t lament what didn’t get done — plan how you’ll get it done when the weather warms again. 

I’m considering putting a small deck adjacent to my house’s patio, one that would dry quickly after a Midwest spring rain. First things first, I need to decide upfront how much time and energy I can put into this outdoor building project. What’s most pressing for me to figure out is the footings, which go into the ground and support the legs or posts of the deck.

I could dig 3-foot deep holes and fill them with cement, making sturdy and freeze-resistant piers. This is a good idea, as I certainly don’t want the deck to warp and weave in response to seasonal changes.

On the other hand, I could use deck blocks, which sit on top of a base of fine gravel. They’re easy to move around, require no digging and allow the project to move along more quickly. However, they are susceptible to frost heaving. But if I think it’s possible this deck wouldn’t be permanent, it would be easier to take it apart and relocate it if I used deck blocks.

Have you built a deck? What approach did you take to support the posts? Are you dreaming of building a deck? Share your experiences and plans by posting a comment below.

My daughter lives in an apartment in New York City. As you can imagine, space is at a premium and any piece of furniture that can serve more than one function is likely to be a winner. I was taken with the highchair they bought when my granddaughter was old enough to sit up in one. It looks a bit like a step stool, but is actually a multilevel highchair that will be functional for many years.

The chair design in the 1986 article, The Family-strength Highchair, offers similar advantages. It has an adjustable tray for the youngest years or can be used as a high-chair as the child is ready to join the family at the dinner table. Once you’ve built this chair, you’ll want to make one for every household in your family with small children. It will be an heirloom gift that will last for generations.

Have you ever wanted to make your own paper for invitations or special hand-written note cards? Many books and articles have been written on how to make paper, but what distinguishes this How to Make Homemade Paper article from the rest is it encourages the use of newspaper destined for the landfill or recycle bin to be used as the raw material for your new handmade paper.

This is the perfect "re-cycle project:" newspaper, perhaps itself made from recycled paper, is used to create the pulp from which your new heavy-duty note paper is made. It’s fun and easy to do — a great project for these cool fall evenings at home with the family. After the paper has dried, you can use some autumn or Halloween-themed rubber stamps to jazz up your new homemade cardstock.