Category Archive

The Great Offbeat Outdoors

The “outdoors” might be a 24’x36′ garden or a clutch of terracotta pots in a window box, but these posts cover all things gardening, landscaping and even farming. This category also includes stuff about the outside of your house — doors & roofs! — as well as vehicles like cars & RVs.

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How to use that grody public grill without fear of poisoning your picnic

Public grills get a bad rap. I can definitely see why. They’re always coated in the mysterious carbony remains of meals past. There’s usually some bird poop on or around them. The ash pile inside is a ghastly reminder that anything — anything — could’ve been cooked on these rusty little public servants. I promise with just a little work, a public grill can be a totally serviceable cooking option.

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Impress your cat with a DIY rainbow deck

Let this cat introduce you to the latest and greatest in deck make-overs. Homie BubblesLeFay uploaded this photo to our Flickr pool and I just had to squeeze more details from her. This is how you can pull off your own rainbow deck re-do:

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How can we make the backyard of our rental feel awesome for parties?

Since we’re renting the house, I want to make it more homey, but I don’t want to pour money into a yard that we’ll eventually leave. Any other suggestions on how to make this yard a bit more family-friendly, while also being renter- and budget-friendly?

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You are totally planning your first canoe trip right now

Once upon a time, in University, my friends and I sat around our living room, discussing all the things we’d rather be doing than studying for our finals. Somewhere between sky-diving and climbing Mount Everest, portaging came up as an option. Before we knew it, a trip was planned and packed, and we headed out into the Ontario wilderness less than one hour after our last exam. We were rained on, got lost and sidetracked down a disused, flooded snowmobile track, and ate mostly rice flavoured with soup mix in a tortilla with salsa. We came home tired, sore and dirty. And it was completely amazing. In honour of that first trip, here’s a guide on everything important you need to know/do to survive your first canoe trip into the wild.

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How can I get outdoor lighting with no power?

Here’s the dilemma… we’d love to make more use of our large balcony — except there’s no power outlet out there, or even lights above. It gets pretty dark out there, so we havent really made much use of the space at night which is a shame. We’ve run extension cords for power before, but it would be cool if any of the Offbeat Homies have got better ideas for lighting up the balcony!

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What can I do with these branches?

I have several piles of branches that have fallen out of the trees in my back yard and I was looking for a way to use up some of them before my landlords come and clean them up. what do I need to do to them to make them safe for indoors? To make sure there are no bugs or fungi or anything else growing on/in them. And what would be the best way to seal them, or make them last a long time?

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We made a tiki-inspired “carbana” in three weeks!

As soon as I saw Megan’s carbana post, I knew that was the answer to the ongoing question of “WTF do we do about our horrible backyard?” Here’s how we pulled it off our tiki-inspired carbana in three weeks.

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Great idea: Make your driveway glow like a starry night

Driveway gravel + glow in the dark stones = your driveway looking like some sort of magical mystery tour destination. You can get the glowing rocks on Amazon for $11, but of course it would take a lot of $11 packages to make a driveway glow this much…