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31 Days of Making, Day 19: A Whole New Floor (Part 2)
Yesterday, I shared the progress we made on tearing out our old flooring. Today, we start laying the new flooring! I’ll keep things short since it’s been a lot of work and we’re still only halfway finished. We started by laying out the planks we wanted to use. This approach let us easily design the... Read More
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31 Days of Making, Day 18: A Whole New Floor (Part 1)
My most ambitious making project yet: replacing the flooring in the entire first floor of our house — all 1200 square feet of it.
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31 Days of Making, Day 17: New Coat Closet
In the continuing saga of my renovation plans for the foyer of our house, you know that I’ve torn down the wall closing in our entryway and framed in a new pantry and coat closet in that space. For day 17, I finished the major work by sheetrocking the closet and shiplapping the rear wall.... Read More
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31 Days of Making, Day 16: Barn Board Shelf for LEGOs
My 6-year-old got a lot of LEGOs for Christmas. I’m not exaggerating… a set of 2000 miscellaneous blocks, several kits, and an army of various characters. And that’s not even counting the LEGO sets my other kids got. A few weeks ago at a friend’s house, he saw a shelf for showcasing LEGO characters, and... Read More
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31 Days of Making, Day 15: Handmade Family Signs
Now that Christmas is finally over, I can share something that Jessica and I made for some of our family members as a Christmas gift. We cut 12″ rough cut pine planks about 60″ long and stained them with Minwax’s Classic Gray. Then we printed out some large, 6″ wide letters (Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended)... Read More
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A historical perspective on the political cost that often comes with speaking truth to power.
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Stop talking about politics, Jesse!
Why do you write so much about faith and politics?
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31 Days of Making, Day 12: Piano Improv
Extemporaneous piano... the kind of music that soothes my soul.
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31 Days of Making, Day 11: Build That Wall
For day 11, I finally made something instead of just tearing stuff down.
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31 Days of Making, Day 10: Unmaking More Walls
For day 10 of my December making project, I tore down an old hallway closet in order to build a new closet and a walk-in pantry.
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31 Days of Making, Day 9: A Plan to Redesign Plasticmind.com
This is day 9 of my 31 days of making. I’ve always struggled designing my own site, so I decided to treat myself like a client and walk through the full site redesign process… on camera. In this first video, I work through the goals of my site, review what’s working and what’s not on... Read More
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31 Days of Making, Day 8: Created a New Logo Treatment
This is day 8 of my 31 days of making. One of the mental barriers that has prevented me from being as prolific in my writing is a strange paralysis I get from feeling like my site is ugly and outdated. I’d love to create a new design, migrate to a new CMS, build out... Read More
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31 Days of Making, Day 7: Unmaking a Wall
This is day 7 of my 31 days of making. On day 5, I shared the renovation plans I made for the first floor of our house. Last night, I started turning those plans into reality by tearing out the short wall that separates our entryway and living room. Unmaking is often an important part... Read More
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31 Days of Making, Day 6: Turning Music into Art with Processing
This is day 6 of my 31 days of making. While I was putting together the animation for my previous music video, I learned a whole lot about Processing in a very short amount of time. So I thought for this day, I’d make a short video talking through some of the things I learned... Read More
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31 Days of Making, Day 5: Planned Home Renovations
This is day 5 of my 31 days of making. Earlier this year, we made some major changes to the layout of the first floor of our home. They were relatively inexpensive changes — taking down one wall and putting up another — but they had a huge impact on the flow of our home.... Read More