When was the last time you made something? Deborah Ng at Simply Thrifty took it upon herself to make something rather cool: a hyperlinked list of 100 things you can make yourself. Deborah writes:
It seems the more we advance, the more stuff is done for us. I don’t mind letting someone else do all the work for me — the problem is of course, that convenience is expensive and we’re getting really lazy. I started thinking about all the things we can make ourselves if we put forth a little effort and found lots of cool instructions online. My fellow cheapskates, I give you 100 things you can make yourself.
The list contains a lot of food items, such as:
- How to make bacon
- Brewing root beer and ginger ale
- Oven-fried potato chips (these look awesome and easy)
- Mmmmm… donuts
There’s more on this list than just food, though. Here are some more crafty projects:
- Make your own book
- Homemade laundry detergent
- How to make incense
- Homemade paper
- Make and use a pinhole camera
- Build bookshelves or a tree fort
- Make your own kite
These are just a handful of the projects Deborah has collated. What are you waiting for? If you’re looking for a fun way to kill some time, head on over to find something you can make yourself!
[Simply Thrifty: 100 things you can make yourself]
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Those potato chips are so good. I used to make ones just like them a lot. They really are easy to make (just don’t let them burn).
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I eagerly (and perhaps naively) followed the link for building your own bookshelves. I thought I’d be looking at a hammer, nails and plywood project, likely a real money saver.
Given that the project actually described requires well over $500 worth of tools, it’s not clear to me how much can be saved. I can purchase reasonably nice bookshelves for $80, five of which hold my fairly large book collection.
I might be missing something, but it seems to me that one can only justify owning (for example) a table saw:
a) as a luxury for a woodworking hobby, which is perfectly valid, but we’re now out of money saving territory
b) to furnish an entire house and then some, which most just aren’t going to do
I’m skeptical as to whether these tools pay for themselves for most people.
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@tsiroth
I’ve been kicking around a post about setting up a home shop at various budget levels, from finding cheap hand tools at garage sales to picking out decent power tools. As a long-time home-owner, I have every tool on that list. They remain unused 99.9999999% of the time. Not exactly a wise use of money.
As my friends and I have begun to realize that it’s stupid for us each to own a table saw, we’ve begun to keep mental lists of who owns what power tools. I know that Andrew, for example, just spent $500 on a whizbang compund miter saw. He knows that I have a table saw. We know that Paul has a planer and joiner.
Anyhow — this is just a lot of words to say: yeah, you’re right.
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I made my own beer.
It costs about $40 for a batch of 5 gallons, which is about 53 x 12oz bottles, or about 8 six packs. Typical microbrews and imports around here are $6-8 for good beers, for a savings of $12 to $30 per batch. I enjoy homebrew more than purchased because of the work I put into it.
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It is silly to buy $2000 worth of power tools to make a bookcase. It is not silly to buy them if you’re remodeling or renovating your own house. We have installed laminate flooring, moulding, redone our bathroom, and are soon going to be tearing out our stairway and foyer railings and floor and building a half wall and laying more laminate.
We use our tools, including our table saw, repeatedly. By doing so, we save money every time versus hiring someone to do the work for us, and we know the work will be done to our satisfaction. Anything beyond our capability, we do hire out, but we shop around and screen carefully, and limit the scope of the work to -only- that we cannot do ourselves.
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Taking the “cheapskate” mindset is ignoring the real question – how much is your time worth? Say you make $60k a year. That makes your hourly wage $30/hr. Think about how much time it takes to build, say, a bookshelf and comparing that buying it. However, if you are building it because woodworking happens to be your hobby, that’s different.
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[...] Via Get Rich Slowly. [...]
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Yes buying a book case for $50 might be okay if you don’t have the means to build one. However you can just go to your local lumber yard, pick up some 3/4″ wood a few cinder blocks and in a few minuets wou have a new book case with an up side. You have supported your local area and it didn’t come from China
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Great
, and thank you very much for your blog, this is great to read your articles.
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