New Goals

Last December, Ariel Lautman, a full-time mom in the DC area, resolved to stop buying prefab furniture for her family and instead, build some herself.Ariel planned to start small with bookshelves for her one-year-old’s bedroom before working up to bigger projects for her home’s common areas.

November Update:

The woodworking project took a major leap forward in the spring and early summer when I started working on a screened-in porch for our back yard. This is my most challenging project to date, and I’ve definitely learned a lot from it.

I took measurements and used Skitch (an application that lets you take notes on photos) to keep track of everything so that when I went to the hardware store I could ask them what I would need. Things really started to feel like they were coming together when I got the door hung, and that’s when progress pretty much stopped … for a couple of reasons.

In the early summer we learned that we had made progress on another important family goal: we will be expecting our second child in March of 2014!

There are a couple of small things I’d like to get squared away before the winter sets in (the door to the porch started sagging, so I’d like to reinforce it before the hinges are permanently damaged), but I don’t know that I’ll embark on anything completely new. Though who knows … during the last couple of weeks of my last pregnancy I decided to build our king sized bed frame from Ikea all by myself.

Slideshow: Work in Progress