I Saved Some Door Slabs From Certain Death

I forgot to show you my fence!  I love the colors.  I helped the neighbor patch up his shed.

I saved a number of door slabs from certain death today.  Ten feet high, 1-3/4” solid core doors with a wonderful enamel finish.  I asked my wife Dana if I could have $50 to get some materials to build some storage shelves for the basement.  (She’s in charge of the house hold money)  after looking at our account and making a bunch of anxious sighs, she reluctantly approved the release of funds.  That’s when I remembered the doors I saw sitting in a pile waiting for their demise. I took them home, cut them up and turned them into a bunch of shelves.  I get great pleasure in taking someone else’s garbage and giving it a new life.  A new purpose.  Especially when it’s free! 

In our “throw away” culture it is amazing to me to see what is going into our landfills.  Seattle has what they call “transfer stations”.  Basically huge concrete pits about 12’ deep, 100’ wide and about the length of a football field where people back their vehicles up to and toss in their garbage.  (These are not apparently big enough; so two larger ones are currently being built)  A huge bulldozer pushes mobile mountains of trash into a hole where the garbage is compacted and transferred into a container that is then pulled by semi truck to a train yard.  There the container is transferred from the semi onto a train car (by a diesel burning transport lift) were it then enjoys a 5 hour train ride to eastern Oregon.  There it is transferred off the train car by a lift to another semi, pulled to a landfill currently the size of one of the larger mountains in the Cascade range, dumped and spread around by yet another bulldozer.  Talk about a carbon footprint!  That’s 8 fossil fuel burning pieces of equipment just moving our trash from one hole in the ground to another!

On any given day that I head to the pit it’s about a ¼ to ½ full with a colorful array of trash.  I watch one person after another toss in their unwanted items and think to myself, “Wow.  This is one moment of one day and this place is open 360 days out of the year!”  I also think “Wow, look at all that wasted material.”   Here my mood generally darkens at the laziness of people when I see what could be pulled out of the garbage and re-used or recycled.  But I will avoid the preaching.  (I do recommend a great 2o min video that can be found at www.storyofstuff.org I’m a big fan.  Great for video for the kids) But there is a big difference between what is truly “trash”  - i.e. that which really cannot be used again, and waste  - i.e. that which we throw away because we either don’t know what to do with it or we’re to lazy to deal with it.  So into the land fill it goes.   Old doors, furniture, plastic containers, usable wood, old clothes… You name it.

So what’s the point of my observation?  With a little creative ingenuity so much of this stuff can get a second chance at life to be something functional, useful and even beautiful.  

A couple of summers ago, I was involved in the demolition of a house in order to make way for a new house.  It was an awesome experience as we hand deconstruct the house and track every piece of material that came out of it to see where it ended up.  I am happy to say that at least 90% of the house was either re-used or recycled.  Less than 10% of the structure ended up in the landfill.  Bits and pieces went on to live in other structures.  Sadly (or fortunately depending on ones point of view) I was not an owner of a home at the time so I could not dig into the bounty before me.  A bounty of material that was ABSOLUTLY FREE!!  Oh, you can imagine the pains a penny pinching junk collector like myself was feeling as piece after useful piece of that house was hauled away to someplace other than my own back yard! (Which I didn’t have at the time)  

But now I have a house.  One that has endless possibilities for projects both big and small for me to practice my craft of salvaging, scavenging, storing and re-using what may be considered another’s trash.  GIVE ME YOUR JUNK, YOUR TRASH, YOUR UNWANTED ITEMS YEARNING TO BREATH NEW LIFE!!!!  O.K, o.k. I need not get carried away.  I try not to let my yard look like that on Sanford and Son.  But I have started a pretty good collection.

For what you ask?  I have a garage.  A small garage that was built some time in the 1920’s.  It’s pretty damn cute but ready to fall over.  Like a tired old lady still trying to look youthful with some blush and powder on her face.  The past owner put just enough paint on it to make it look adorable enough that I now have an emotional attachment to it. My friends, seeing the rouse keep saying, “Get rid of her!  She’s old and ugly.  Tear her down and build something new”.   But beauty is in the inside, right?  The old girl sill has strong bones and a cozy charm.  So I want to save the old lady and give her a new life.  Not just as a garage, but as a place that all can enjoy the beauty that I see.  As a guesthouse.

With this blog, I invite you to join in my endeavor to turn this leaning, rotting structure into a place I will want to place my guest for a cozy overnight stay.  I realize this is nothing new.  But I want to document my progress on this rehabilitation.  The exciting thing for me though, will be to see how cheap I can do it.  My goal: to fix this up on next to no money with that I find, scavenge and salvage.  I will track every expense and see if I can keep it under $1000.  As I pick up each piece of material and incorporate it into this structure I will be whistling, “Everything old is new again”. 

Ain’t she a beauty?                                   

JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE.

                                                                                                           

 

It Started With A Chicken Coop

It started with a chicken coop. Actually it may have started with a pile of bricks and a full dumpster sitting next to my house. My mom would say that it started long before that. Some guys were building a new house next door. As they tore the old one down I saw so much useful material just getting thrown into the dumpster to be hauled away and forgotten. I shivered at the thought. Not possessed by any kind of environmental outrage at what was going to end up in a landfill, but possessed by the excitement as to what cool stuff was sitting in that huge metal box. You could say that I have been a junk collector all my life. My mom would simply roll her eyes as I stepped through the door after an afternoon of neighborhood trash diving. Some kind of twisted piece of metal, tangle of string, chipped mug soon to become my favorite. My prized discovery was a life size plaster statue of a mother fox sitting watch over her pups playing around a tree trunk. An amazing piece of Midwest blue haired art. Both beautiful and functional. A prerequisite of midwestern sensibility. The tree trunk was hollow as to fit a potted plant or perhaps your half read newspaper. I was in love with the cheese of it and it held a place of honor in my room up to my sophomore year in college when the inconsiderate actions of my too cool roommates left the mama fox forever shattered and violently ripped from her babies. (As you can see I still have not fully recovered.) So knowing what treasures could be hiding in a mere thrash can, you can now imagine that the shiver that hit me by the sight of a 20 yard dumpster sitting right next to my house was unavoidable. The first haul was 286 bricks in various state of honeycombed crumble. A beautiful fire and chocolate orange breaking through a layer of black soot. Next was various 6 to 8 foot sections of an aged cedar fence that yielded well over 100 useful fence boards and 2x4's. Aged to a variety of dark brown, forest green and mellow silver-grey. Some just rotted to a state of interesting character and all in great shape for a second life. I stuffed everything under our deck to my wife's questioning looks. "Don't worry honey." I told her. "I have a plan... I have a plan." My first project was our chicken coop. Much to the humors of friends and neighbors I prided myself on how little money I spent on this structure. Scavenging what I could from the guys building the house. A few 2x4 scraps here, some roofing material there and "Voila!" I built me a chicken coop for all of $19. I did have to buy the wire. That ran me $54. So 73 bucks is still not bad. My next endeavor was a fence, of course. We had new neighbors move into the new house next door. (The guy building the house gave me a nice teak patio set he want to throw out, by the way) The new neighbors wanted to build a new fence between our yards. Not able to help out financially, I offered to tear down the fence to save them a few bucks in labor and dump fees. Instead of hauling it to the dump it ended up under the deck. Another 86 boards that my daughter Jaimie got to learn how to use a nail puller on. Quality father / daughter time pulling nails and talking over the days events. (I hope Jaimie has the same nostalgic memories of the event.) The fence on the other side of my yard was looking pretty worn out. As I tore it down, I discovered that it was not only a fence, but a retaining wall as well. holding up as much as 8" of my neighbors yard. Lucky I had those bricks under the deck and the number of half used bags of cement I stopped from being tossed at work. Roughly 56 feet of brick retaining wall with a cedar fence above it a gate and trellis for a total cost of $212 Jaimie had a friend over one rare sunny day this past summer. She was peeking under the deck and said, "Jeez Chris, you sure have a lot of junk under that deck. What do you do with all that junk?" I looked down from the ladder I was on as I fixed my gutters. I pointed out how I made that chicken coop with the junk under my deck. I pointed out the fence, the gate, the compost bin and the gutters I was replacing on the house all came from under that deck. Material that was not junk but pieces of structures that had run their time and now lay in wait for a chance to be reborn in something new. "Wow!" she said. "Everyone should have junk under their deck!"