I spent a fair amount of time patching holes in walls and removing blue tack stains. To avoid this I was looking for a quick solution to hang pictures that would make my life easier when it would be time to repaint my daughters rooms.
I come from a country where walls are made of cement blocks, concrete or bricks. Most houses in the US are wood framed and even if the exterior walls are made of solid bricks, the interior walls are hollow. There’s a lot of lost space in there and it’s easy to make little openings or built in storage space. Plenty of holes in the walls.
This lamp, initially used as a desk lamp, was built and partially designed by my grandfather. I came up with the overall concept and dimensions but since I didn’t know (and still don’t) how to weld, he did all the manufacturing. He was also really good at finding and repurposing parts designed for different applications. The interesting thing about this lamp are the parallelograms at the base and elbow. These allow to have 6 points of friction to maintain the angle and hold the lamp in place without having springs or counter-weights.
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what to do with the stair railings. I contemplated replacing them altogether or find a way to improve them. I liked the overall dimensions but the triangular pattern and the shape of the handrail were not my taste.
My 12 year old daughter wanted a raised bed that would also be a platform she could walk on. She saw something like that on a TV show and naturally assumed I could build it. I quickly realized that what she wanted would probably require a 500 square foot bedroom. So I decided to lump together a bed, a desk and some shelves to create a large flat surface that would resemble a platform. It’s a bed, it’s a desk, a besk, a ded, a badass bedesk.
I was looking for a sturdy coffee table with simple, modern lines. Something with solid wood and a steel frame. I used to have a coffee table with a shelf underneath. That was extremely convenient to store all the stuff that would otherwise lay on the table itself so I wanted a table with a shelf. I went to the usual places, IKEA, CB2, Crate and Barrel, Room and Board, Pier 1, Ethan Allen and a few other local stores but sure enough I couldn’t find the right coffee table (at a reasonable price too). Since nobody ever built what I needed, I had an excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway, build my own coffee table.