Getting those wood scraps out of the basement

We moved into this row house only a half-dozen years ago. We were looking for a place in the city which would accommodate our bike habit, knowing that most row houses aren't super bike friendly: the main access is up a flight of stairs and then straight into the living room. We love biking, but don't want our bikes in the living room.  

When we toured this particular house, there were already a bunch of other possible buyers up in the living room, so we took a detour through the side entrance, and discovered that there's easy access from the street to a large basement area, with lots of storage for bikes.  Beyond the bike storage area (what else would you use it for?!?), there's a basement room with a woodworking area, and spaces for canning shelves, and even a bathroom.  We fell in love with this place just for the basement alone.  (It turns out the rest of the house is nice, too.)

But having a large basement comes with consequences.  My dad used to say, "stuff fills to expand all available space".  And indeed, we've filled the basement up -- with canning jars, off-season supplies like Christmas decorations, family memorabilia that we're going to look at "someday", and with wood.

The wood in the basement; oy.  I never bought wood; but I trash-picked all sorts of wood-based objects for my projects.  I made shelves out of a dining-room table with a broken leg; I found bed slats that turned into cow shelves. I love making things with wood.  But the excess, it multiplied like bunnies.

I read somewhere on the internet (meaning I have no idea if it's actually true) that one of the things that hoarders hoard -- one of those things that's incredibly challenging to get out of their houses -- is wood scraps.  Now that I'm moving, I know I have to clean out the basement, and the wood scraps seem to sit in every corner.  

Or rather they seemed to sit in every corner.  I've spent about two weeks sawing them into smaller pieces and boxing them up, so I can get rid of them. I know that Habitat Restore will take a lot of supplies, but wood scraps are NOT one of the things they want.  I have a friend who heats his home with wood, and if I saw the scraps into manageable pieces, he can take them.  

So that's what I've been doing: turning my "just in case" wood scraps into warmth for his home.  Apparently, I had a lot of "just in case" -- how could I get SO MUCH wood in just 6 years?  It never feels like I'm bringing home so much, and the basement never looked super junky.  But somehow, I have now filled nine boxes with firewood for my friend.

I will say, the basement is starting to look a bit more wide-open than it had before.  Getting stuff for free is a thrill, but getting rid of stuff in a way that is creative and generous is also fulfilling.  And that's what I'm enjoying now. 

There's a lot more de-junking to go -- some of which is sitting on shelves we've made with scrap lumber, and the shelves themselves will need to be de-junked, too.  But getting this wood carved up has been cathartic.  Good-bye, wood scraps!  Be warmth and light to my friend.

Fluffy stuff (from inside a couch)

A while back, I curbed-picked two couch cushions -- the big kind, not that you sit on, but that you lean against at the back of the couch.  I thought maybe they'd be a better color or more comfy than our current cushions.

The verdict: Really, these turned out to be about the same in terms of comfort as our current cushions, and the color wasn't that much of an improvement. Now, years later, it's time to release these back into the world.

I could just put them back at the curb for the trash haulers; after all, that's where I found them first.  But that is a LOT of stuff to head to a landfill or get burnt into poisonous gasses and ashes.  So I'm trying to find another way to put them to use.

The first step, of course, was disassembling them. I zipped off the outer blue covers; the blue upholstery fabric will make great fancy bags. That's the easy part.  The insides, to my surprise, weren't solid foam blocks, but white fluffy stuff: fiberfill!

Underneath the blue upholstery fabric
were white cotton (?) liners containing fluffy fiberfill.

Fiberfill (sometimes called polyfill) is the stuff that crafters use to fill teddy bears and other stuffed animals.  I went through a decade of making just such little animals for family and friends.  Nowadays, a one-pound bag of this sells for about $8 or $9.  And here, I have a bonanza on my hands!

But what to do with this myself? I'm no longer in the animal-making mode, and I don't really want to start up a new hobby just because I happen to have a glut of something I don't want anyway.  Instead, here's what I've tried so far:

• I called our local recycling center.  I assured them I know that they don't take it, but do they know anyone who does?  The woman who answered the phone commiserated with me; she hates to see how much stuff goes to waste, but says that she doesn't know of takers.  Instead, the only option she knew of is to be resigned to seeing it go in to the waste stream, where it would get burned. 
• I listed the fiberfill on Freecycle.  No takers.  Sigh.
• We had a bunch of pillows that have gotten packed down over the years.  I haven't replaced them because -- well, the usual, because I hate buying new stuff that will eventually go into the garbage.  In this instance, though, I took advantage of the fluffy bonanza.  I cut open the ends of the flat pillows, trashed the flat-mashed innards, repacked the pillows with fluffy fiber fill, and sewed the ends up.  Four "new" fluffy pillows, for free!  

I'm still working on responsibly rehoming the rest. It's hard!  I might someday have to give up and trash these bags; I'll update this post when their fate is determined.

Update:  

Our local creative reuse place DOES gladly take fiberfill, they tell me.  But even before I could take it there, my daughter nabbed it to stuff some creatures she's crocheting for a friend.  So, two good reasons to keep hunting for ways to rehome stuffing responsibly, avoiding burning or burying something that someone else would eventually have to purchase new!

A painting spatula, and a brush bag

I was just touching up the living room walls, and the paint can--now half-empty--was starting to get a little crusty and rusted, the way paint cans do.  

So, as I was taking care of this paint job and also transferring the paint to better containers, it struck that this is a good time to do a little homage to two small painting hacks I've adopted during the last decade: a paint-brush bag and a paint spatula.

These hacks exhibited here.

The paint brush bag: is this something everyone else knows already?  If so, I've been pretty clueless much of my life.  Basically, it's this: if I'm painting something that will require more than one coat, instead of rinsing the paint brush out between uses, I put the bristle end of the brush in a small plastic bag and seal the open end of the bag tightly.

Then, the brush doesn't dry out between uses, but also I don't have to spend time/water rinsing the brush out.  I even have a dedicated little plastic bag that I store with my paint supplies for just this use.  The only time I rinse the brush is when the entire job is done and I'm putting everything away.  When I finish one coat, I just wrap the brush up in the bag, and unwrap it when I'm getting ready to start the next coat. So simple!

As for the spatula:  getting the last paint out of a paint can is just as frugal as getting the last bit of mayonnaise or peanut butter out of a jar.  So when I realized I had acquired more thrifted rubber spatulas than I needed in the kitchen, I dedicated one rubber spatula to the paint supplies box.  For the living room project, I used the spatula to help transfer the paint from the increasingly decrepit can to a pair of glass jars, where it's easy to see and unlikely to go bad.  

I don't put new wine in old skins, but I do put old paint in new jars.
Even when the spatula is washed off,
it still sports a few old paint splotches on the handle.

Rags vs Water smack down: Rags win!

My husband and I spent a lot of time in the car lately, driving back and forth to see some of our distant children and killing lots and lots of bugs on the grille and hood of our car in the process.  When we finally arrived back home, the car was now speckled.

A bug-speckled car is pretty gross (and I'm guessing the bugs agree, not that they could express an opinion about it any longer).  So I set about to clean the car as it was parked along the street.

I used a technique that I learned about long ago from a book called "Speed Cleaning": it's one that is not only speedy -- as the title promises -- but also uses a heck of a lot less water than the way I used to clean floors and other large surfaces (like cars).  And basically, that technique is "more rags, less water".

I took two small buckets (basically, large bowls) out to my car.  When I started, one bucket contained some warm soapy water and about 20 rags made from cut-up t-shirts; the other bucket was empty. I'd use a rag to clean one section of a car until the rag was filthy, and then I'd dump the dirty rag into the dry bucket and pull out a new, clean rag. 

In particular, I never paused to rinse a dirty rag, and I never put a dirty rag into the soapy-water bucket, so the water stayed clean.  Hence, I spent zero time cleaning the rags, only cleaning the car.  And that one little bucket with its quart or two of water was the only water that went to cleaning the car: much less water than spraying with hoses.

For the particularly buggy places that needed a bit of extra scrubbing,  I also nabbed a small bowl of water and a scrubber to help loosen up the junk; I didn't mind dipping the scrubber back into the increasingly dirty water because once the junk was loosened, I could then wipe it off with a clean rag.  The job of the scrubber is to prepare the way for the rag, not to actually clean the car.

One of the things that I have learned to appreciate about this technique is that it's a lot easier to stop in the middle of a cleaning job and come back, if that is necessary. I can use a few clean rags to clean part of a kitchen floor, and there's no giant bucket on wheels blocking my way needing attention if I then decide to go take care of other business. 

When I finished, I had a small pile of dirty rags that then went straight into the laundry room; the washing machine is a much more efficient use of water and time for cleaning those rags out than I am, after all. I also had a small bucket of clean soapy water and a car that has been debugged and prettified. So satisfying!

I think it's official: I'm wealthy in canning jars

Amassing canning jars has been a lot like building up monetary savings, for me, at least. When I first started canning, it felt like there were times when I had enough jars/spending money, and times when emergencies would arise and I was scrambling to make it through.  I constantly had my eyes open for ways to thrift, and canning jars were part of that thrift: I'd nab curbside jars, gladly accept hand-me-down jars from other people's houses, even pay for 25¢ jars from yard sales.  Still, occasionally I'd have to break down and purchase more at full price.

It's hard to go from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, not only with money but also with other things in my life. Even though I know I have enough money to retire comfortably, for example, I can still pull out the scarcity-supervillain-cape when it comes to my morning coffee: when I travel, I carry around both a water bottle and a coffee bottle, so I don't have to wake up in a coffee desert.  

But I think I'm ready to declare that, when it comes to canning jars, I have enough and more than enough: I am wealthy in canning jars.

Here is the evidence.  Firstly, the basement shelves with jars of food I've canned or stored.

If I go grocery shopping in the basement,
here's where I go.

I've got cherries, tomatoes, peaches, lemon brine, and even a few jars of chicken stock and green beans down here. I also use jars to store dry goods like beans, sugar, rice, etc, and I've got large quantities of those on the shelves as well.  I know that apple sauce canning is in the near future, as is turkey stock (post Thanksgiving).  That means I'll be needing to fill an additional 3 or 4 dozen jars, at most.

Those are the jars that are full.  There's a whole other shelf of empty jars.  And, at the risk of drawing envy from the outside world because of flaunting how vast my vault of canning jars is, I'm just going to bling it out here for you.

So many jars.  Jars, jars, jars.

In fact, that picture above is AFTER I rearranged and culled the jar collection.  That set of shelves was getting cluttered enough that I spent an afternoon reorganizing it.  I used chalkboard paint on the front of each of the boxes to give me space to indicate what's inside (I love chalk for labeling things). I sorted each box so it contained exactly one kind of canning jar (meaning not all boxes are full, but a surprising number of them are).  Empty boxes go upside down, for quick identification and also for keeping clean.

I really, really love labeling things!

And having done all this sorting/organizing/labeling, I realized I had both more boxes than would fit on the shelves (no wonder it felt cluttered: it really was cluttered!), and also . . . drum roll . . . more canning jars than I'd be able to use.  

Too much of a good thing: more boxes than I need.

Canning jars that sit in my basement gathering dust (and sawdust) are not part of helping make the world a more frugal, sustainable place.  So now that I know I'm wealthy in canning jars (and in other areas of my life, too) , I've started the process of canning jar philanthropy.  I'm going to start offering them back into the world, via Freecycle and word of mouth.  

It's a good feeling to be rich in jars, and it's even a better feeling to finally know it.  

An idiosyncratic window well platform

A few years ago, I nabbed a large wooden filing cabinet off of Freecycle.  It was the kind with sideways drawers -- it looked more like a table or a dresser than a tall pillar.  I figured, since I would soon be retiring and would be moving files from my office to my home, I'd need it for storage.  

Did I need it?  Actually, no, not in the long run.  As I transitioned from office to home during my last official year as a professor, and then condensed stuff to make my home rentable for the year after that, I realized that the number of paper files I actually want to have on hand is much smaller than I'd anticipated.  This large chest for storing files was not only more storage space than I needed, but it was also taking up a lot of floor space that I wanted to free up. And--since I knew from trying to rehome file folders within the office that everyone else in the world is moving from paper to digital-- I knew I wasn't going to easily find a taker for this giant piece of furniture. 

So instead of putting it back on Freecycle, I disassembled it with my screwdriver into many flat planks of wood.

I'd read somewhere that one of the big clutter items that makes cleaning out houses a challenge is scrap lumber -- all those pieces of wood that "might be useful someday".  Whether or not scrap-lumber-as-hoarding is actually a broader reality, that concept resonates with me: I have all sorts of wooden odds and ends in the basement, and I try hard not to let them take over the space . . . but I don't always feel like I succeed.  I didn't want to add this lumber to the basement stash.  Could it find new life?

Sometimes I slice up scrap lumber and offer it to friends with burn pits.  Much of this old cabinet was laminated: not suitable for burning. And I didn't want to do a project that would lead to a new piece of clutter -- I didn't want to make yet another Something-that-could-be-useful-someday.  

Here's a side rant: you know how sometimes you'll read gushing articles about how we're saving the planet by turning soda bottles into something like park benches?  The tone of those articles irks me.  It's not saving the planet -- we're postponing the inevitable hazardous waste problem that plastic bottles impose on our finite planet.  It's not like the world was saying "Hey! We need more park benches and have no idea of how we could make these from wood or stone or other non-toxic materials".  I say that to note that this cabinet-deconstruction project is in much the same category.  I know that whatever I do is just postponing an inevitable  disposal problem. 

What on earth (or in my home) could this heavy
block of wood be useful for?

I had a solution in search of a problem, that's what I had.  And so I let these boards sit for a while, to give me time to cogitate, and then one day an actual solvable problem just zinged into my consciousness.  Huzzah!

Here in the "Kitchen of Many Delights", one of the oddities of architecture is that the sink is in front of a window, but not right next to the window: the counter wraps around a window well. Why? I think the people who installed the counters and such didn't want to cover up the bottom of the window for some odd reason.

So behind the sink, there's a deep well that's basically inaccessible unless I climb up onto the counter and reach way down.  

I've learned to live with this -- I find it so odd that it's kind of amusing.  But I realized that instead of letting stuff fall down into the well and having to get out the ladder to clamber around to rescue it, I could create a platform to house my new plants.  (This window gets some of the very best afternoon and evening sun, after all).

The space is an odd shape, but I traced out a template with newspaper, and then used the template and my circular saw to cut the heavy, laminated cabinet top to size.  I used some of the other boards from the cabinet to create an "I"-shaped support underneath the platform, to raise it up.  

And now I have a platform I can reach, a platform that's washable, and that is actually useful -- instead of taking up space, it makes formerly inaccessible space useable. 

The window well holds my new plants,
and has a lovely view of my neighbor's trash cans.
Memento mori, folks.

I still have a few pieces of lumber left from that cabinet, but they're mostly particle board I can deal with more easily.  The biggest (and most laminated) portions are doing useful service for me.  I'm totally counting this project as a success.

Returning pots; getting plants

Even though I don't really have a lot of potted plants, somehow I happen to have a bunch of plastic pots. Many of these are the kinds plants are sold in -- not the pretty kind you put on display, but the kind many people would toss.

However, of course, I try not to toss them if there's a decent alternative.  And in fact, most nurseries will gladly take these back again and reuse them.  (That's plant nurseries, not baby nurseries).  Discovering this a few years ago made me happy -- maybe that's why I have this small stash, because I rescued them from the curb and gathered them to take back to a store?  They don't take a lot of room, fortunately.

At any rate, sometime last week my college's greenhouse folks sent out an email with the subject line, "Semi-Annual Greenhouse clear out today!"

The Greenhouse has been abundant this summer, and we need to clear benches for our research!

This Friday, from 12pm-2pm, the student workers will be on the steps outside [our building] with a variety of low-light tolerant houseplants, ZZ plants, succulents, and cacti in need of good homes - all while supplies last.  Please consider stopping by, ask about the newest research endeavors we are kickstarting, and adopt a new friend!

Please consider making a donation of a dollar or two per plant to cover the cost of materials - we also accept donations of used pots, medium or large nursery containers, soil, and might even be interested in some gardening equipment. 

Trading pots for plants?  Yes, please!  I gathered up those pots and headed over; I'd intended to pick up one or two plants, but (a) the folks there were super happy about the little pots I'd brought them and (b) they were also delighted to foist several kinds of plants on me, so I got four little plants.

Here are my new plants, awaiting their transplanting (!)
into terracotta pots.

Now I have a new set of little plastic pots to return to the greenhouse, but the overall plant-to-plastic-pot ratio has greatly improved in the house, so I'm happy.