Making do with the doyenne of DIY
BY ALEC BRUCE
DIY Mom Rebekah Higgs bevelled and sanded a second-hand table top, fashioned legs from some oak dowels, and made herself a dining room table for just over $90 in materials.
PHOTO: REBEKAH HIGGS
Inset: Nail some oak strips to a piece of finish ply and Higgs says you have the makings of terrific sliding door for home or office.
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f you’re like me, offered the notion of building a barn-style sliding door with old wood and a second-hand steel runner, you’d say: Why would I do that? But if you’re like Rebekah Higgs of HGTV, Forbes, Chatelaine and Centura magazines fame, you’d say: Why wouldn’t I? “It’s a great way to stay creative this winter and to really make your home unique and individual,” Halifax-based Higgs says. “It just makes sense to use any and all leftover wood and reno materials around your home, or build furniture yourself.” What’s more, she says, with supply chain shortages continuing into 2022, and the cost of construction materials and labour continuing to rise, it’s a great time to start building your DIY repertoire. “I encourage people to try. It will be worth it in the end.” Certainly, Higgs has walked that particular talk. The Nova Scotian singer-songwriter spent time in Toronto before she realized she was becoming just another face in an already crowded industry. “Once I had a baby, I didn’t want to be sleeping on floors, and traveling anymore,” she says. “I wanted to change careers.”
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And vantages. “So, when my daughter was one, I moved back to Halifax because the quality of life was better. I always loved to decorate and do creative things on a budget. So, I came up with DIY Mom and I ran with it.” That was 2014, and since then she’s been happily running her own show from her home (which she’s been renovating) in the Rockingham area of the city. She’s currently wrapping the fifth season of DIY Mom for Bell TV on Demand. Her message to viewers is cheerfully clear. “It’s actually a lot easier than it looks,” she says. Take that sliding door, for example. “I had a barn-door hardware kit sitting around from my previous home renovation and decided the entrance to my mudroom would be the perfect place to hang one,” she says. “As I didn’t want my midcentury-modern home to have a traditional or farm house style door, I decided to build my own. Using oak, I cut equal strips on a table saw and secured them with a finishing nail gun to a piece of plywood. When laying out the wood for my tambour (slatted) pattern, I used scrap as a spacer.”
