Hidden cubby on Ikea bed

A while ago we bought an ikea bed. It's kinda huge and has drawers which was pretty important for our old house as the closet space is very limited. When I finished assembling the thing I was really struck by the huge dead space left between the drawer and the head board.

I thought to myself what a perfect place to install a hidden chubby for those things you hope the children never find. I'm a huge fan of Make magazine and various Hackaday kind of sites that have projects of hidden storage and rooms in everyday objects. It's from reading about these projects that I was aware of hidden/invisible hinge setups. I carefully measured the board that I was going to replace and ordered a hinge that would fit into the that space. I was going for a completely hidden finished product, and since the Fjell was a pine bed finding stock that would match wasn't hard, nor was the painting of it.  I installed it on the side of the bed that is closer to a wall so you cannot see it from far away, and used a magnetic child latch to keep it from swinging open. 





Score one for the hidden sex toy storage cabinet.

Battery Powered chainsaws are garbage

Yeah, so I've been working on this chair for kind of a little while now and I can categorically say that electric battery powered chainsaws are a terrible idea.  I won't comment on ones that plug into the mains as I don't know how those would work, but lord I pray that they work better than what I've been working with.

The top three most annoying thing about this chainsaw?  1. It has a 10inch bar.  2. Batteries are a terrible, awful way to power it. 3. Batteries are a terrible, really awful way to power it.  I get about 30-40 minutes of work in with 3 batteries, but really its 5-10 minutes of good work then 30 minutes of shitty work.  Now I will say that the chain could probably use a sharpening, and I know that tightening the chain up made the process less awful.  All of that aside, really what it needs is some damn horsepower.  Really.


So at this point the chair is down to about 60lbs of wood.  It started close to 100lbs, a good deal of that was water weight so just getting it dried out will help, I pulled the bark off so the drying should be faster (if it ever stops raining here!)

Homebrew with your kids

A while ago Lifehacker posted an article that really makes me excited for the future when my son is older.  The thrust of the article is that by taking away the mystery of alcohol you can help destroy some of that allure that draws kids to start drinking.  If their attitude is, "hey that's just a crappy version of the stuff my dad makes" they won't be trying it in unmonitored situations.

My hope is that I can give some sanity to my son, I know that I never really had a problem with underage drinking and where I lived the attitude was pretty relaxed.  The parents didn't encourage us or buy it, but we had a safe place to be and no one was allowed to leave if they drank so we didn't get into situations with driving.  Personally I really only got "drunk" maybe 2 or 3 times in all of High School, and it wasn't really a big part of my friends agenda.  I'm not saying we didn't play cards and drink beer or booze, but almost never was it a blackout fest or do stupid shit.  Just that we did it for the most part sober.   I think that the group of kids that was 4-8 years older than us partied so hard, we didn't want to end up like them so we where all pretty mellow.

Healthy Stuff

So here is a link to a study on the effects of learning about gardening, cooking and nutrition course on a group of Latino students about 10 years of age.

The outcomes where pretty positive for the group that participated, less weight gain than their peers in the control group (they are young children so they are gaining mass regardless) and huge change in their intake of dietary fiber! The control group actually took in -12% from the over the course of the study from the groups baseline, and the participants in the other group took in +22%. That is a pretty impressive swing in the sample, so teaching them about veggies encouraged them to eat them. If this isn't an argument to start a garden with your kids and talk about vegetables I don't know what is.