Weekend Projects: 5 Style-Boosting Bar Stools You Can Build Your home bar isn’t fully stocked for the holiday season until it features one of these DIY bar stools. Whether located indoors in the kitchen or outdoors on the patio, a home bar can be a scene of rest, relaxation, and revelry during your potlucks and cocktail parties. But if there are more drinks to go around than there are seats, your guests will spend most of the party playing a game of musical chairs. To prevent a lack of seating from hampering your hosting duties, we’ve handpicked five DIY bar stools that would elevate the ambiance of your bar—and have every guest flocking to it. This industrious, adjustable-height stool from Ana White will feel right at home in an industrial-style kitchen or bar. Like the DIY maven, you can achieve this look by cutting and assembling rectangular scrap wood planks for the legs and cross beams, a square with angular-cut corners for the seat, and a round for the booster seat.
Drill an all-thread rod from the booster seat to the cross beams to construct the adjustable-height mechanism and ensure that no order is too tall for your home bar. When creating an ultra-flexible work environment for his wife, the handy husband at Subtle Takeover devised this modern, elevated stool from rustic plywood to accompany her standing desk. Cut from plywood into three pre-drilled planks for the seat, front leg, and back leg, the stool can easily be glued and screwed together. A coat of polyurethane over the finished furniture heightens its style in the refurbished workspace—though this workhorse of a stool easily transitions from the office to the bar. Nothing is better than pulling up a seat at the outdoor patio bar with this rustic all-wood stool from DIY Pete. Start by cutting your cedar lumber supply into lengths for the legs, seat, support beams, and seat back. Pete’s detailed guide to cuts at seven different lengths and exact spots for holes will walk you through each step of the weekend woodworking project.
Once you finish attaching the seat boards to the support, test them out while you call up friends and family to invite them over. This industrial pipe stool from Love Grows Wild is the best seat at the bar—bar none. Give the idea some legs—specifically, four legs—by assembling together pipe, pipe fitting, 90-degree elbows, and caps. After adding a floor flange to the top of each leg, secure the round, wooden seat to the top of the stool. Let the seat go au naturel, or stain or paint it to make a splash long before drinks are served. The blogger at Remodelando la Casa wasn’t always sitting pretty in these inviting, industrial-style stools. After observing the clash between her modern bar stools and rustic kitchen, she settled on a hybrid of the two styles. To mimic the DIYer, create the wood round from pine, poplar, and plywood boards, all glued and cut to size for a comfortable seat. Then simply spray-painted metallic base of an existing stool to marry the old world with the new, and finish off with the addition of the new tops.
Entomology and Nematology | Baldwin, Rebecca W | Pereira, Roberto M | Koehler, Philip G | Bed bugs �How to Make a Bed Bug Interceptor Trap out of Common Household Items1Bed bugs have become an increasingly common pest problem throughout the United States. They have been found in many different places where people congregate, from schools and restaurants to doctors’ offices and movie theaters, but the worst infestations are usually in the places where people live, rest, and sleep, like houses, apartments, hotels, and homeless shelters. At these locations, bed bugs are most common around pieces of furniture people sit or lie down on—beds, chairs, and sofas. To discover whether bed bugs are present in a room or a piece of furniture, a device called a bed bug interceptor trap can be helpful. Interceptor traps catch and collect bed bugs when they try to travel between their human hosts and their hiding places. Bed bug interceptor traps are easy to make out of commonly found household items and disposable plastic containers.
How an Interceptor Trap Works Interceptor traps placed on all of the legs of a piece of furniture can help prevent bed bugs from infesting that piece of furniture and also reduce the movement of bed bugs already on the furniture to the rest of the room. Interceptor traps rely on the poor ability of bed bugs to climb on smooth surfaces. The traps have rough areas to allow bed bugs to enter easily and a smooth-surfaced moat that prevents them from escaping. Bed bugs trying to either get onto or leave a piece of furniture find themselves trapped in this smooth-surfaced moat instead.Items Needed to Create an Interceptor Trap A small container that will fit under a furniture leg (example: a margarine tub or a food storage container)A large container that the small container will fit inside (example: food storage container)When the small container is placed within the larger container, there should be at least ¼” space between the walls of the two containersRough-surfaced tape (example: masking tape)Glue (example
: hot glue gun or super glue)Option: Surface applications to make escape from the traps even more difficultUnscented baby powder (talcum powder)Car polishOption: Support structures for each trap to prevent the traps from cracking under the weight of the furnitureSquare of tile orSquare of plywood Step-by-Step Instructions for Creating an Interceptor Trap Cut four pieces of rough-surfaced tape. The cut pieces should be at least as high as the wall of the smaller container. 2. Evenly space and firmly press the four pieces of tape vertically on the inside surface of the smaller container to connect the inner top edge with the container bottom. 3. Wrap the rough-surfaced tape around the exterior side of the larger container so that the entire outer surface is covered from the base to the upper edge of the container. 4. Glue the smaller container onto the center of the bottom of the larger container. 5. Make surfaces smooth so that bed bugs cannot escape.Option: Apply car polish or talcum powder to the interior side of the larger and exterior side of the smaller container.
Follow the directions on the car polish bottle on how to apply and buff the product. If using talcum powder, do not touch the dusted trap surface with your hands. Talcum powder should be reapplied as necessary. 6. Move the piece of furniture to be protected away from walls and other furniture, and place a trap underneath each of its legs. With beds, bedding should not be touching the floor, walls, or other furniture. Option: On carpeted floor, place a square of tile or plywood underneath the trap to prevent the trap from breaking under the weight of the furniture. Any bed bugs found caught in the moat of the trap (Fig. 12) can be left there to die or drowned in soapy water. (Spray them with a 10% dish detergent and water mixture.) To make sure the insects in the trap are in fact bed bugs, take them to an expert for positive identification. Use tweezers or a cotton swab to put them in a leak-proof container of 70% rubbing alcohol, or, if you can’t extract them from the trap because they’ve managed to creep under the smaller container, put the whole trap in a sealed plastic bag and take it to a pest control professional or county Extension agent, who can help you take the next step toward eradication.