My husband is handy and he loves to be green so he has built me a lot of garden furniture and home furniture (including a headboard and some benches out of a torn down picket fence) — what a way to use recycled lumber.
Take a peek at what you can do with used, thrown-away, wood.
Think what you can do if you put your head, heart, and hands into it. Maybe you could be building headboards and garden benches out of recycled lumber. Or, if you have some other ideas, please share them in the comments section.
We always head to Habitat ReStore first when doing any projects–to get used materials before buying new! We’ve made shelves in our garage, benches by our fire pit and paths with old lumber. I wish we were handier, though.
We use a Habitat store for used doors and windows and sometimes even fixtures. The lumber use is right up Doc’s alley. He has a pile from our old dock sitting in front of his shop he gives out to anyone needing treated wood and he used it himself to make us a deck in the woods to watch the marsh birds. He can’t wait to get back out there to his shop, hopefully this summer.
Ooooh, so many interesting ideas. Makes me wish I had a new project to tackle.
I just sent the link to my husband. Maybe we need a new bench in the backyard.
I have found some great stuff at Goodwill and Salvation Army. I got this nasty yellow end table – sloppy, gloppy paint – for $5 at Salvation Army. But the drawer was dovetailed and it was hard wood. I had to buy the paint stripper, but I already had the little triangle-head sander.
With a lot of elbow grease and about $20 in materials (stripper, varnish), I turned that thing into a work of beauty. A friend who does estate sales and who is a certified appraiser said it is maple and he would price it at $150 at least for an estate sale.
You can see a photo of it (2nd photo) at this link: http://class-factotum.blogspot.com/2009/02/tuesday-report.html
You may also see the cool humidor (photo 5) and the pie safe (last photo) that I got at Goodwill. I didn’t have to do any work on those, but they are all recycled. Sort of.
I have stripped paint from dressers and tables and bookshelves and put on new hardware. You can find some really nice furniture at junk shops as long as you are willing to overlook a bad paint job. Just look at the wood underneath and the way they are built. Good bones can always be rescued.
Let other people pay retail, I say.
OK now I am just bragging and I am not sure this counts, but when our basement flooded nine days after we closed on our house (yes, I would rather have had raw sewage go into Lake Michigan than have our basement flood) and the ugly carpet was ruined and had to be pulled out, including the carpet on the basement stairs, we were left with horrible-looking stairs. We didn’t want to re-carpet them because it was going to add $$$ to the carpeting price.
Our contractor said the easiest thing to do was to build new stairs for $500 and I said Are you CRAZY? For $500, I can buy some really nice shoes. I am going to try refinishing them first, especially because the contractor said they were maple.
So. Look at the before and after.
http://class-factotum.blogspot.com/2009/05/hoe-not-ho.html
Point is there a lot you can do if you are just willing to spend the time. I know nothing about woodworking but I am not lazy.
Well, I am lazy, but I am cheaper than I am lazy.