Build a bench, and other DIY projects

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a do-it-yourself contest happening over at Apartment Therapy. Well, the entries are in and readers submitted some great tutorials for home-improvement projects.

The contest categories included general home, kitchen, office/high tech, babies/children, and green projects. You can see a grid of all the entries here , and if you narrow in on the “re-nest” column you’ll see all the projects made from recycled materials or in some earth-friendly way.

The upholstered bench above is among the entries. Can you guess what it’s made of? An old bed headboard. Clever, huh?

Another of my favorites from the re-nest competition is this whole-house effort to remodel using secondhand goods. The homeowner went so far as to build her own sofa, starting with an old wooden door as the base.

In the interest of full disclosure, one of my projects is in the running in the babies/children category. It’s a hanging book display I made for my 3-year-old daughter so she could see the fronts of her books instead of just the spines (it’s tough to choose a book for storytime by looking at the spines if you don’t know how to read yet). You can see my tutorial either on the Apartment Therapy site or over at my craft blog, Penny Carnival.