Do it yourself

It is an oasis for creation, available to anyone with a little space and the compunction to get their hands dirty."In Natural Selection, Dan Pearson draws on ten years of his Observer columns to explore the rhythms and pleasures of a year in the garden.

Sunken Gardens is packed with everything someone new to the hobby needs to know; it details the equipment needed to get started; surveys the best plants for aquascaping; and shows how to design, plant, and maintain an aquascape.

Everything you need to use your handplanes!No woodworking tool is more satisfying, quick and precise to use than a handplane. Planes can process timber in its rough state, bring boards up to a glimmering smoothness, cut rabbets, dados, grooves and other joints, and trim wood with a precision that has yet to be matched by power tools.

Tiny Houses Built with Recycled Materials is full of ideas for using reclaimed materials and upcycled goods to construct a tiny house that is good for the earth and truly unique.

This book describes 50 of the world's most important woods for turning and goes into great detail with regard to physical characteristics, working qualities and availability. Colour photographs throughout illustrate different qualities of grain and figure. An additional 100 woods are considered more briefly.

People appreciate that living smaller is easier on their bank balance, their time and the environment. Magazines and newspapers are featuring these smaller wonders more frequently. Now is the time to re-present fundamental small-house design strategies - complete with whole-house case studies for homeowners eager to simplify smartly.

Zero Waste Home is the ultimate guide to simplified, sustainable living from Bea Johnson, 'the priestess of waste-free living' (The New York Times).Bea Johnson transformed her family's health, finances, and relationships for the better by reducing their waste to an astonishing half litre per year. It's all down to the 5 Rs: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot (and only in that order!). Zero Waste Home shows how these key principles can be applied to every area of your house from the kitchen to the kids' room, and it's packed with easy tips for all of us: from buying in bulk and clever meal planning to simply refusing unwanted freebies and using your plants as air fresheners.Bea Johnson shows, by inspiring example, what green living looks like and offers a practical, step-by-step guide to diminishing your environmental footprint and improving your life.'Bea Johnson is a guru of zero-waste living. The book is precise . . . simple yet deep. It doesn't preach.' Sunday Times'Johnson is an incredible advocate for her lifestyle . . . refreshingly honest.' Metro'Chic, charming, stylish' Red

Following in the footsteps of the successful Beginner's Guide series, The Beginner's Guide to Upholstery takes readers gently by the hand and shows them the simple techniques they need to bring their love of fabric to upholstered items for the home.

Drawing on centuries of male wisdom, this book covers every conceivable situation, including: How to hit a bullseye in darts; Know your beef; What to look for in a second hand car; Essential DIY tips; How to organise a stag do; and How to give yourself a number one cut.

Helps you create holiday masterpieces for the home, family and friends with the tried-and-true scroll saw projects and patterns from the archives of "Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts". This collection of holiday favourites features fretwork, compound-cuts, intarsia and inlay projects for ornaments, wreaths, Santas, portraits, and candleholders.

An illustrated guide to woodturning aimed at woodworkers at all levels of skills: a one-stop solution for experienced turners and novices alike. It guides you through the various health and safety issues, the tools and equipment needed to get the best out of your woodturning, mastering the basic techniques and how to add decorative features.

Everything you wanted to know about building a workbench, making outfeed tables for shop machines, making work tables and assembly tables, storage cabinets for tools, materials, supplies. Bonus: Build like an aircraft engineer, super-flat and strong with a torsion box workbench, assembly table, and alignment beams.

Demonstrating how woodworkers can approach the complex job of designing and making built-in cabinets for kitchens, family rooms, and home offices, this technical handbook provides meticulously detailed shop drawings, instructions, and hundreds of professional tips for saving time, materials, unnecessary aggravation, and money.

Gathers useful information about woodturning chucks and fixtures. This book is designed to help both beginners and advanced turners improve their skills and broaden the range of projects they tackle at the lathe, by presenting a crafted combination of how-to advice and projects.

Collins Complete DIY Manual has sold over 3 million copies and is the most comprehensive and authoritative DIY manual ever produced.

Lumber prices are soaring, and deforestation is a rising concern. Yet millions of pounds of perfectly usable wood are dumped in landfills every year. Wood Pallet Projects shows how anyone can upcycle salvaged pallet wood to create truly one-of-a-kind projects. Maverick craftsman Chris Gleason combines sound woodworking techniques with a hip designer's sensibility to unleash the limitless possibilities of the common skid. Inside you'll find inspired projects for rescuing and repurposing pallets. Some of his pieces celebrate the rough, edgy character of the material, while others are crafted as fine furniture. He shows how to construct both indoor and outdoor furniture in a variety of styles, along with other useful items, such as a birdhouse, a toolbox, and even a ukulele. There's plenty of nitty gritty here on working with pallets, including where to find them, how to process them into usable lumber, fasteners, sanding, and the best finishes (if any) to use. The author provides important advice on how to make sure that your pallets are safe, and not sprayed with harmful chemicals. A colorful gallery of finished work provides further inspiration for green crafting.

Presents 62 cabin design interpretations that range in size from a cozy 100 square feet to a more spacious but still economical 1,000 square feet, and include sleeping accommodations, kitchen and bath facilities, and a heat source. This title provides floor plans with suggestions for designing the space for optimal use.

Covers three main areas of taking care of birds around the home. This book emphasises on a back-to-nature approach with houses designed to not only look natural - with careful wood selection and an unobtrusive appearance - but with fitting the house to the bird itself, addressing the needs of individual species.

A step-by-step guide which covers various aspects of building a garage from the planning and design stage through to construction and completion.

Whether readers are looking to add a small solar component to provide a modest contribution to their home energy needs, build a new home powered completely by solar panels or do anything in between, this updated, revised and expanded title provides detailed answers to all of their questions.

The consumer guide to small-scale wind electricity production! Maybe you're not T. Boone Pickens, but you can build your own home-sized wind-power empire right in your back yard. Wind Power For Dummies supplies all the guidance you need to install and maintain a sustainable, cost-effective wind generator to power your home for decades to come.

Helps you select the proper tools for sailboat refinishing, and prepare surfaces for painting and varnishing. This title helps you work with old and new plastic laminates, and lighten aging wood trim, oil, seal, and varnish wood surfaces.

Guitars, furniture, even canoes... bending wood adds a new dimension to what can be built in a workshop. This resource provides woodworkers information they need: from the woods best suited to bending to understanding fundamental hand and machine bending techniques. It includes topics of moisture content and wood preparation and elasticity.

Teaches the basic techniques to get started, as well as more advanced ways to approach and create finely crafted boxes. This book offers this advice: Repeat yourself. Repetition leads to refinement and refinement leads to success. It arranges the projects by the level of difficulty, instructing you to use your imagination and ask a few questions.

Everything you need to know to achieve a DIY-standard retreat - the sort of holiday home you have always dreamed of. The authors describe each step in the process, from identifying the land to deciding on and developing plans for a structure that suits your lifestyle and budget.

Includes equipment requirements, instructions for creating wall foundations, coping with drainage problems, and hints for incorporating gates, fences, and stiles.