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.

Most of us prefer to heat and cool our houses or apartments with simple-to-use machinery such as furnaces and air conditioners. The next level of difficulty in heating might be the use of a woodstove for heat, or opening and closing windows for cooling. But you can go one step further and build a heat grabber.

A heat grabber is a simple box, painted black, that hangs outside of a south-facing window. The box is hollow and insulated. The sun strikes the black flat face, heats the air inside the box and the hot air flows naturally up and into the room. Some folks add a small fan to the unit to move the air further into the room, but it can be used effectively in a small room even if you don’t use a fan.

So, would you be willing to build and use a heat-grabber box to heat a cold room in your house? If so (or not), tell us about it in the comments section below.

Fine Woodworking Editor Asa Christiana says that the irony of making a workbench is that you need one just to build one — usually.  

Fortunately, for those of you who are still without a workbench, Christiana has come up with an easy-to-build design that includes free PDF plans and an instructional video in which he and woodworking associate, Matt Berger, take you through the process of building the workbench’s base.

This project will not only provide a safer work environment and the potential for better woodworking results, it uses supplies found in your local lumberyard and requires only basic tools you probably already have on hand.

Check out the video and free PDF plans for this easy-to-build workbench.

Consider this image — you have a new pair of boots that fit like a glove and are oh-so comfortable, but it’s time to take them off. You bend over, grab the heel and pull … not a wiggle. OK, try it sitting down. Put your foot on your knee, push down on the back of the heel and pull up on the toe … nothing.

Or, you can use a bootjack — a V-shaped piece of metal or wood that you put the heel of one boot into, while stepping on the back of the jack with the other foot. This allows you to stay standing with your foot straight, giving the best leverage for getting your heel up and out of the boot.

You can purchase a fancy metal bootjack from a farm store or you can make one yourself from a branch and a scrap of wood. Here’s a design for a forked-limb bootjack you can put together in a couple of minutes.