Our Built-in DVD shelf with TV mount

In December, we remodeled part of our house. In our entire 3 bedroom house, we had one tiny hall closet in addition to our standard bedroom closets. There was no where to store anything, but all of our rooms were enormous. We decided to rip out our closet wall and build a large walk-in closet, stealing the space from the adjacent bedroom. In addition to the wall we built to separate the closet from the second bedroom, we also had to build a wall where the front of our closet had been since we were putting in a standard door where the 7 foot closet opening had been. When you first walk into the room, there is a wall directly to your right. If you follow that wall to the back of the room, you reach the door to our new closet. I don't feel like my post so far is making much sense, so if you are confused, maybe these pictures will help:

View from the second bedroom:
Here the closet has been ripped out and the new door and wall have been added to fill in the space from the old closet opening. The brown walls are part of the second bedroom. The blue walls are the inside of the master bedroom's old closet. After this picture was taken, we added another wall separating the new closet from the second bedroom between the door and the vent in the ceiling.

This is the same wall from the other side, after all of the work has been finished and our new DVD rack has been built. The door on the left goes into the closet. The door on the right is the entrance from the hallway.
 Someday, my husband will get around to finishing the trim around the closet door.

Anyway, we didn't want to put anything between the two doors that would stick out into the isle because then you would have to walk around it to get to the closet. More importantly, it would become an obstacle any time you were moving anything large in or out of the closet. So, we decided a DVD shelf and TV mount would be perfect. It would only stick out about 6" and we could still get good use out of the wall space. The only problem is that DVD players never fit on a 6" shelf, and since we're cheap and don't pay for cable, the TV is useless without a DVD player. 

Luckily, we realized all of this before we finished building the wall. We noted where the cross-braces were, and my husband ran the electrical wires to where we were going to want an outlet before we put up the drywall. Then when he built the DVD shelf, he made a cubby in the wall so the DVD player would fit and he put an outlet into the ceiling of the cubby so we could plug in the DVD player and TV. This would have been much more difficult if the wall had already been finished, and I'm not sure we would've attempted it. We plan to divide another room in about a year and I will definitely spend a long time thinking about what we may want against the new wall before we finish building it.

New Fire Pit - Part 2 of 2

About 2 months ago, I wrote a post about the beginning of my latest project: turning my trash heap of a burn pit into a pretty, stone-lined fire pit. You can read about the early stages of my project here. I have finally completed it, and it is everything I had hoped it would be. To recap, this is what it started out looking like:

Technically, this is what it looked like after many hours of digging. It started out shallower on the right side, which is where we decided we wanted our burn area to be. So, in this picture I have already started digging the hole on the right side, using the dirt to help fill in the left side. We knew before we even started that we would need to buy dirt to fill in the old hole, and we were right. It ended up taking 5 pickup truckloads of dirt and we probably should have used 6.

I'm cheap, and patio bricks are expensive, so I spent a long time thinking about what to line my new burn pit with. When I thought up the answer, I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner. Broken concrete! I've seen it listed free on Craigslist a lot (usually as fill) and always wondered why anyone would voluntarily put a big pile of concrete in their yard, even if they did need to fill in a hole. I still would never use it as fill, but for wall-building, I'm in. I looked through the free ads and did a search for "broken concrete". I got a few results, but they were all about an hour and a half away. I decided to wait for something closer. 

After about a month of waiting and religiously checking Craigslist, I gave in. Not only had there been no ads posted closer to me, there had been no ads posted, period. I e-mailed a guy that had posted an ad for broken concrete a month earlier, fully expecting it to be gone. It wasn't, and he seemed relieved that someone finally wanted the pile of rubble that had become a permanent addition to his front yard. He said that it had been put there with a loader and we would need to bring a sledgehammer to break up some of the bigger pieces. Perfect. I had been worried that all of the concrete would be broken too small to use as bricks, since apparently the only known use for broken concrete is filling in holes. We took the truck and utility trailer and loaded up all the concrete he had. I wasn't sure it was going to be enough, but it ended up being EXACTLY what I needed with nothing left over. 

After I dug out the new hole, I used a 3 foot level and a garden rake to make the whole circle even and level. Then I put my shovel in the middle of the circle and used a stick on a string to mark out a circle. Once I placed the first layer of concrete, the circle looked like this:

I added dirt to the outside of the circle after every layer and sometimes had to pack it in under the outside of the concrete pieces to keep them from leaning or wobbling. I saved the biggest pieces for the top layer to help stabilize the wall and because I think it looks better that way. Once I finished the wall, it suddenly became clear how uneven the rest of the yard was. In some places the wall stopped a foot and a half below the level of the grass, in others it was 6 inches higher than the ground around it. My husband tilled all of the ground within 3-4 feet of the wall, and I used a shovel and garden rake to smooth it as much as I could. I tried to keep the top of the concrete level with the ground around it so that mowing would be simple. Now we just need  to plant some grass! 

Final cost breakdown for this project: $60 for dirt, about $150 for gas to go get it and the concrete, ? for the grass seed.