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We go camping about once a year. It’s always a toss-up whether or not we decide to bring our own firewood, or pay $10 per tiny bundle at the “camp store”.
In the past, we usually decide to bring our own, but it either makes a mess in the car or doesn’t stack well in a container.
This year I decided to spend 5 extra minutes to chainsaw the logs down to size before splitting them(so they fit vertically in our plastic bins). It worked beautifully.
This quick little graphic says it all!
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If you’ve already followed the Flower Box Part I article, you have all of your flower box and trim pieces cut to the appropriate width and length and are ready to begin assembly.
It’s usually preferable to make all of your cuts first, as it allows you to get into a rhythm not only on the cutting but on the assembly as well.
If you only have one drill, it’s typically easier to drill all your countersinks and pilot holes in one step, then insert your fasteners (screws) in another step.
If you have a counter bit, great! Tighten it up in your drill. If not, you’ll have to do this in two steps, one with your counter sink and the other with your pilot bit.
See the diagram below.
The side of the board that you drill the counterbit holes in will be the visible side (the screws will be covered up with trim). So make sure you choose the side that is most aesthetically pleasing for each board.
Now that you have everything cut and predrilled, simply assemble all three boxes with your 1 1/2″ screws!
The best way to do this is to piece together and glue all sides of the box. Clamp the box in place with bar clamps and start screwing it together.
The technique I recommend to assemble the face frames is called pocket hole joinery. This technique provides adequate strength for smaller projects while hiding the fasteners “behind” the visible face of the wood. I provide more detail here on pocket hole joinery.
Now that you have all of your trim cut, this step is relatively easy. See the diagram below for pocket hole placement and trim assembly.
There are a number of ways to attach trim to a box. Cabinet makers often prefer to use biscuit joiner, which involves creating a few small football-shaped “grooves” in the back of the trim and the box itself. Then, gluing a biscuit into both grooves.
While this technique is clean and precise, it requires the use of a biscuit joiner, which is not part of most people’s toolset.
The easier approach is to simply glue the frame on the box, then fasten it with finish nails. The finish nail holes will hardly be visible once the project is complete. Especially if you spend a few extra minutes filling the holes with wood putty before you stain the box.
The next step is to assemble the top trim using the same pocket hole method as with the side trim.
The difference being that the edges are mitered. This presents two minor challenges:
The first one is easily solved by simply placing the mitered edge flat on your pocket hole jig when drilling the holes. See the image below:
The clamping problem is solved with the use of clamping squares (as mentioned in the Tools section of part one).
By clamping a square at each corner as you insert the pocket hole screws, it’s easier to ensure that the two mitered corners stay together while fastening.
We’ll use the same method that we used to attach the side trim. That is:
For your stain choice, you’ll want a penetrating oil based stain. It will peel less over time. Penetrating stains get deep into the wood instead of resting on the surface.
That being said, your method of application can play a factor in how deep the stain penetrates.
Spraying stain may be easy, but it doesn’t really allow the stain to seep deep in the wood. A brush is typically the best way to apply penetrating stain.
Give your new flower boxes a few hours to dry after staining, then load them up with potting soil and start planting!
P.S. it is up to you whether or not you choose to put gravel at the bottom of your flower boxes. Some say that it overcrowds the plants, while others say that the drainage is necessary.
The good news is that you now have three boxes to experiment with!
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A contemporary flower box borrows it’s design from modern kitchen cabinet styles. Some have posts, columns or corbels, while others have raised panels or intricate moulding.
To a professional woodworker, these accents and techniques are just part of their skill set. But, we’re not professional woodworkers!
I’d like to approach this mini-project from the prospective of someone who doesn’t have the full arsenal of woodworking tools. Though, I would like to introduce you to a very affordable, simple and strong joinery technique called pocket hole joinery (if you aren’t already familiar). Pocket hole joining is a technique where the fastener itself remains hidden, but creates a strong butt joint. Butt joints, typically considered a weak and silly joint used only by the lowest of DIY amateurs, are given new life with pocket holes. More to come on that later.
Let’s get started.
Approximate Cost: $30 – $50 per flower box (depending on box size).
I designed the flower boxes around 8ft. x 12″ cedar boards. My local 84 Lumber sells 16 ft. x 12in. cedar boards for $60. They were willing to cut them down to 8ft. at no charge because it wasn’t that busy when I bought them (I believe they normally charge $1 or $2).
Cutting them down to 8ft. makes them not only easier to load into your vehicle, but easier to work with in the workshop. It also makes the “cut math” a little easier.
Eight foot boards means three equal width flower boxes at 32″ (including trim).
The 12″ board width (11.5″ actual) allows us to create 10″ tall boxes while reserving extra material for the trim.
Cut List
(6) 30 1/4″ x 10″ pieces (for Front & Back)
(6) 11 1/2″ x 10″ pieces (for Sides)
(3) 29″ x 11 1/2″ pieces (for Bottoms)
Cut Process
Let’s start with a diagram to help guide you:
Cut List
(12) 31 7/8″ x 1 3/8″ Trim Pieces (for Front & Back rails)
(12) 13″ x 1 3/8″ Trim Pieces (for Side rails)
(12) 7 1/4″ x 1 3/8″ Trim Pieces (for Front & Back stiles)
(12) 7 1/4″ x 3/4″ (11/16″ actual) Trim Pieces (for Side stiles)
(6) 31 7/8″ x 1 3/4″ Trim Pieces (for Top)
(6) 14 1/2″ x 1 3/4″ Trim PIeces (for Top)
Cut Process
After you make the cuts for the box itself, you’ll have a 8 x 1 3/8″ piece of trim left over from each of the 3 boards. This will leave you with 24 feet of 1 3/8″ trim (taking away 1/8″ for the width of your saw blade). With one of the remaining 8 foot boards, you’ll have a total of 88 feet of trim. Seems like a lot, but you’ll need it!
It’s also likely you’ll need to tap into your 6th remaining 8 foot board for a couple feet of trim if you run out of material. I know I did.
Now that you have all your tools, materials and cuts done, let’s move on to:
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It’s family movie night – that rare occasion where your spouse and kids are all available to relax on the couch for a couple hours. About minutes into the movie, after you’ve barehanded 5 or 10 massive amounts of popcorn into your face, you hear a familiar sound. It’s the sound of someone filling up the bathtub as water runs through your home plumbing at full capacity.
Except, everyone’s on the couch. Who could be running water? You start wandering around the house, checking all the faucets. You start to head down to your basement, where the sound changes from water flowing through pipes to water coming out of a fire hose. You have a pipe leak. A big one!
Okay, so that’s not exactly how it happened to me, but I like the drama. I was working quietly in my basement at the time (about a week ago). Because I was so close to the source of the leak, I identified the problem within about 30 seconds. But, what if I wasn’t in the basement, or wasn’t even home!
I’m sure there are a number of reasons that pipes leak, but I’m only going to talk about one today, the unsupported pipe (the reason my pex tubing popped off of my barbed fitting).
Gravity imposes stress on any joint. Imagine holding your arms out to your sides for more than 5 minutes. If you don’t get bored first, your shoulder joint will start to ache.
This applies equally to any plumbing joint, especially one that is close to a water source that is stopped and started frequently.
An unsupported pipe joint sags, even if just a little bit. That sagging effect can weaken the joint over time, depending how much the pipe moves when water starts or stops flowing through it.
In my example above you’ll notice that I hastily installed my dishwasher supply line, leaving it completely unsupported. In fact, I left it to rest on my wiring! Granted it was about midnight when I was working on this, so I likely had enough after it was functional. But I should have returned to it.
Here’s the result of my laziness, 3 years later:
Yep, after a few years of water stopping and starting, the unsupported connection grew weaker and weaker until it finally gave up.
There is no easier DIY task than supporting plumbing pipes. Myriad products exist to support water supply and drain lines. The most common arguably are the pipe hanger and the pipe strap.
Pipe hangers are handy for drain pipes as they’re larger and often don’t suit themselves to being strapped to a floor joist, where a hanger would allow them to be suspended from the side of a joist.
I recently stumbled on my favored solution to date, the EZGlide Tube Clamp. They were about $1.50 for a bag of 5 at Home Depot. Easily worth the additional 20 cents over the tube straps.
The tube clamps “clip” onto the pipe to make it easier to attach them to a surface. Once you clip them onto a pipe, they’ll slide along the pipe, but won’t fall off.
In my case, I ran a 2×4 between within the floor joist bay, as it was the only way to properly support the pipe.
It really couldn’t be easier. So, I urge you to spend 5 minutes in your basement or crawl space to see if you can identify any poorly supported pipes. Look at the connections themselves and make sure the pipe is supported somewhat close the the connection.
I spent 3 hours cleaning up my basement today, due to the water leak. Something that could have been prevented with 5 extra minutes spent supporting my pipe.
Each town / state may have it’s own building codes related to how pipes should be supported.
This table was pulled from Virginia’s plumbing code, but I have to assume other codes are similar.
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Table saw image by Patrick Fitzgerald (originally posted to Flickr as spinning wheel) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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About $15 at Home Depot or Lowes, or you can snag one online. They look like this:
Mix it up. All the good thick sealant will settle to the bottom of the bucket, so it needs a good stir.
Avoid stirring the sealer by hand, you’ll tire yourself out before you start!
You might think that the paddle would cause the sealer to splash all over the place. You’d be surprised, just keep the paddle near the bottom of the bucket while it’s spinning.
You might be thinking, “I’ll just be really careful”. Don’t even try it. Nobody, in the history of driveway sealing has been able to walk away clean, without a spec of sealer on them. Like trying to dive into a pool without making a splash, it’s just not possible.
You could wear decent shoes and wrap some plastic bags around them. Or, you could spend $10 on a pair of shoes from Walmart that you can say good-bye to forever when you’re finished.
In the south, this is an easy rule to follow. But in the North, that really only gives us a window from June – September.
If it does rain on your sealer while it’s still drying / curing, it will combine to create a white-colored rough texture that does not look good against black driveways.
One way to be safe is to do a rain dance in reverse.
This seems like more work than it’s worth, but think about it. You’re sealing your driveway for two reasons: aesthetics and protection. The sealer can’t prevent water from getting under your driveway via cracks and holes. This water can freeze and expand – you get the rest.
So, take a few minutes to fill those cracks and holes. Otherwise, this could happen:
Pour a gallon at a time and spread a thin coat in a cross pattern (squeegee one direction, then the other to fill in all pores).
The 5 Gallon bucket is heavy, so it can be helpful to have a one-gallon bucket on hand to scoop some out of the larger bucket. Unless you’re this guy:
Give it at least 24 hours before walking or driving on it. Unless you have special talents.
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Our pool pump has been creating a large mud pit next to our side door whenever we need to drain the pool or backwash the filter. I decided to dig a 125 trench and put in a 4″ flexible drain pipe to send the water down to the bottom of our front yard.
My first inclination was to rent a 12″ compact excavator from Home Depot. It ran about $160 or $170 for the day. But two things came to mind:
Given my unfamiliarity with the excavator and everything that comes with it, I opted for the manual route: the shovel.
I had a $5 shovel in my garage that I used to dig about 30 feet of the drain trench. The ground was rocky, so I really had to put some weight on the shovel which, in most cases, involved jumping on it with both feet to get it to penetrate.
After an hour or so, not only were my middle of both of my feet sore, but I had slipped off of the shovel while jumping on it at one point and cut my leg on it.
I decided to head over to Home Depot and purchase the best shovel money could buy. I was surprised to find that the most expensive shovel was only $25. I was expecting at least a few shovels with gimmicky features, buttons, levers, etc. The selection was pretty basic, but one shovel really stood out.
The RazorBack Shovel had a much larger surface to put weight onto. Meaning that if you needed to jump on the shovel, you had a larger surface to distribute the weight of your body onto. This meant that it not only reduced the chance of missing the shovel when jump on it, but caused far less pain on the bottom of my foot at the end of the day.
The metal “tabs” that you put your foot on also had a few holes drilled or punch into them. This provides a little bit of grip to prevent your foot from sliding.
I’m not going to say that this shovel changed my life, but it was certainly worth the $25 I paid for it. It probably only saved me 10% time-wise, but it certainly did reduce the foot pain. I actually had no problem using it in tennis shoes, as opposed to work boots.
As a bonus, when I put the shovel in my shopping cart, a guy walked by and said “That’s a nice shovel”. No joke!
As I mentioned, I found this shovel at Home Depot. But if you’re more the online shopping type, you might give Amazon a try. Although, I couldn’t find the exact Razorback round-tipped fiberglass shovel that I have. I only found the wooden handle version.
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It’s Thursday morning, I’m working quietly in my home office when I hear the doorbell ring. I take a peek out the window to see a heavy duty truck in the driveway and a guy wearing a contractors safety vest at my door.
“Hey, I’m Bob, we have a crew doing road work down on Main Street and have a half a truckload of leftover asphalt. I noticed that your driveway hasn’t been paved and I can offer you a really good rate.”
We had actually requested three quotes to pave one of our driveways and to put a top coat on the other driveway. All three quotes came in above $10,000, so we tabled the project for a better time.
I explained to Bob that we had already received quotes and they were well out of our budget. He replied that he would offer the leftover asphalt in his truck at just $2.50 per sq. ft. And, if that wasn’t enough to cover the driveways, that he would maintain that same price to complete them with a new load of asphalt. He also went on to tell me that they use a commercial grade asphalt that never requires sealing.
“Well Bob, if you think this can be done for under $5,000, I’d be very interested.”, I said.
“That’s no problem at all, I’ll take care of you, and we accept cash, check or charge.”, Bob replied.
I asked Bob if he could show me the job his crew were working on down the road. He obliged and offered to drive me down to see the work. On the way, we talked a bit, and I mentioned how I hadn’t seen any road work around here. He replied that he was actually referring to a residential driveway that his crew was working on.
At that point, I thought it a little strange that he had leftover asphalt from a single driveway job, but I didn’t ponder it any further. We stopped at the residential job, and I saw guys going work to remove high spots on a driveway, but didn’t get a glimpse of completed work.
“Bob, have you guys done any other jobs in the area? I’d like to see how it came out.”, I asked.
“Yeah, hop in, we did a couple down the road last week.”
So we drove by a couple more completed driveways. I supposed he could have shown me anything, whether his crew completed it or not, but his clever conversation along the way was paving the way to earn my trust.
“So you guys really accept credit card?”, I asked, recalling his pitch at my front doorstep. Bob deflected and started a different conversation. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
After the ride, I gave Bob the go ahead to get started. I hadn’t signed a contract, but Bob had earned enough false trust from me that I had completely forgotten about it. That afternoon, Bob came by with a BobCat and spent 1/2 hour grading our driveways. The scam had begun.
After grading, Bob informed me that his crew would be back in the morning to start paving.
Friday morning came and the guys arrived in their trucks and started parking their equipment. It started with a load argument between two of the workers. Almost an hour went by without anything getting done.
Around 10AM, the “boss” arrives and work begins. They fire up the garden hose and start supplying water to their machine that heats up and spreads the asphalt onto the driveway. They got about halfway down the driveway, then stopped. I heard nothing for 2 hours.
Then, a knock at my door. It was Bob and his brother. They asked me to come outside and talk numbers. We go down to the end of the driveway and the whole crew comes over to join us. While I’m standing there, surround by Bob and six of his crew members, Bob’s brother explains that the cost for the first driveway will be $7100.
Normally, I might have been intimidated by their crew forming a perimeter around me, no doubt the strategy they were trying to employ. I felt deceived though, and I looked Bob in the face and ask him, “what happened to the $5,000 we talked about for both driveways?”.
Bob didn’t say anything, instead his Brother started going into the costs of asphalt and that he’d be happy to come back in the fall and finish my other driveway once we settle up. I asked him how it possibly could come that $7100 at the cost of $2.50 per sq. ft.
That’s when Bob’s brother explained that they had to run two courses of asphalt on the driveway, and that each course was $2.50 per sq. ft.
I said, “Bob, you guys are playing games. We talked about $5,000 and I can’t spend $7,100 on a single driveway right now.” Then, a bunch of other ramblings that I can’t recall.
Afterwards, we all sat there silently. It was a tension they were clearly used to. But I wasn’t, and they knew that. After what seemed like a couple minutes of silence, Bob said that they could finish up this one driveway and settle up. Then, to call them back in the fall to talk about driveway #2.
I told Bob that I wanted them both completed. “Bob, I was honest and open with you that I was quoted above $10,000. You were shocked at that number and said $5,000 was no problem.”
Bob said, “Okay sir, I’ll tell you what, I can do them both for $8,200”.
We settled on that number and they finished the first driveway. Afterwards, Bob asked for $6,500 to cover the costs and payroll for the first driveway. I said no problem, we drew up a contract and I signed it. Then I asked them to hold tight while I get my credit card.
Bob’s brother then chimed in, “Sir, we can’t take credit cards.”
“Hold on.”, I said. “What was that? Bob just explained to me yesterday that you accept cash, check or charge”.
“Oh, he must have been talking about those checks you get from your credit card company.”, Bob’s brother added.
“You guys are really something, let’s just get this over with. I’ll head to the bank and get some cash, just hang out for a few minutes”, I said.
While I was driving back from the bank, I had realized I was being scammed and it was really ruining my afternoon! But, whats worse, I had just realized that the $6,500 we agreed on for the first driveway was 75% of the total cost. They were not going to come back to finish the next driveway.
So, I told Bob, “I’m not comfortable paying you guys for most of the job before it’s completed. How about I give you half now.”
Bob replied, “Sir, I’ll need to talk to my brother, it’s in the signed contract and I know he won’t go for it.”
“Okay”, I said, ” listen, you take half now and I’ll give you and extra $300 at the end.” Yes, I was actually going to pay these guys more than the signed and agreed rate, simply because I didn’t trust them to return.
Bob agreed, and did actually return on Monday to finish the driveway. Afterwards, his brother explained the sealing process to me.
“What! Bob told me that this thing never has to be sealed! You guys are killing me”, I said feeling smaller and smaller each time I talk to these guys. I had been completely mislead from the beginning.
Once the paving was complete, I asked them to clean up the asphalt before giving them the final $300 I promised. They cleaned up half of it, then Bob said, “I need to grab my truck to get the rest, it’s right down the road. Could we settle up now?”
I said, no problem. Thinking, surely these guys weren’t going to push me over the edge by not coming back to spend 5 minutes cleaning up.
Well, I gave him the $300, he drove off, and never returned.
The yard was mess, my lawn had ruts from their equipment, the driveway had wavy lines down the edges, and didn’t come flush to the cement in front of my garage.
They told me stories about their kids to gain my trust, then lied to my face immediately after. It was a really strange few days. In the end, we do have paved driveways, but the quality and workmanship is terrible.
So, I’m really hoping this is a lesson to those out there who might fall victim to this scam. I read about it, it’s actually a common asphalt paving scam. The old “I have extra asphalt” line is apparently one of the oldest in the book!
Learn from my mistake:
Don’t fall for the smooth talking guy in the safety vest!