By James Thomas
After a long time in the planning stage, my son Adam and I began work on a tiny house in 2022. While it was possible to purchase small, modular shower pans and enclosures, small soaking tubs were virtually impossible to find. I’ve built several small boats using wood and WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy, so it occurred to me that building a small tub might be possible.
By James Powers
Shortly after bringing Babka home, James and his wife decided she deserved a sturdy and handsome dog house to protect her from snow and rain.
If you’ve ever used Pinterest, then you know that it is filled with projects that give a false sense of confidence in your own artistic abilities. Hence, the wildly entertaining “Pinterest fails”. Mindlessly scrolling one day, when I probably should have been doing something productive, I stumbled across a rustic wood wall art piece. A little epoxy, some scrap wood, and I can build that. No problem.
As a homeowner, I like to apply my WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy skills and expertise to basic household repairs. There are always repairs and improvements needed around my house, and keeping WEST SYSTEM Epoxy on hand helps to solve many of my personal DIY challenges. Great resources for tackling home repairs can be found in back issues of Epoxyworks. I’ll list some of the home repair and improvement articles that I have found especially helpful. Continue reading
I frequently use WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy to make exterior repairs on our very old house, which is part stone and part wood. The stone sections date from 1842 and the “newer” wooden parts from 1908. Continue reading
Another of my projects using WEST SYSTEM was my mailbox post. I was tired of the snowplow trucks knocking down my mailboxes so, as a hobbyist welder, I built a mailbox post out of steel using square tube, box tube, and angle iron. I wanted the post to look like wood. Continue reading
This cherry basin is a project I did for a bathroom in our home. I turned the 17.25-inch wide basin from black cherry. The top of the cabinet is cherry as well, with a natural edge. I applied three coats of 105 Resin/207 Special Clear Hardener epoxy to each, sanding the cured epoxy between coats. The final finish was three coats of polyurethane.
Black cherry basin with epoxy and polyurethane.
We bought our home, a 1904 stucco American Foursquare, in November 1997. The following spring we decided to build a pine and epoxy fence in the backyard. White PVC picket fences were all the rage in the late 1990s, and while we liked the clean, bright, classic style of a traditional looking fence and felt that was in keeping with the style of our home, we observed that PVC fences tended to blow over in high winds. Considering Michigan’s frequently rough weather, we knew we wanted something sturdier. Continue reading
Over the past few years, I’ve been cultivating an increasingly larger vegetable garden. Last year was my first attempt at growing cucumbers but by mid-summer, they had climbed halfway up the screens on my sun-porch windows. That’s when I decided I needed a trellis. Continue reading
Wooden windows frequently become weathered and develop rot due to their constant exposure to the elements. Often times repairing a wood window is much faster, cheaper and more aesthetically pleasing than replacing it. Over the years we’ve been contacted by architects in search of instructions on how to repair this kind of damage using WEST SYSTEM Epoxy. The following method is what we share with them to restore weathered wooden sills, sashes and trim:
• Remove all the paint in the affected areas. Continue reading