Furniture Recycling

My hubby is a very accomplished woodworker. We have a garage full of wonderful woodworking tools. He has saved us lots of money by making custom furniture for our home.

In 2002, he built this custom entertainment center for our new-at-the-time TV. He made it out of birch plywood that he bought at an estate sale for literally pennies on the dollar. When we replaced our dead TV, he went for the maximum size he could squeeze into our family room, and none of the ready-made entertainment centers worked.

He trimmed the plywood with solid oak and finished it with satin-finish Varathane.

Then, in 2008, he bought a new flat-screen TV. Suffice it to say, he doesn't exactly buy into my "don't upgrade technology until you have to" mentality (see yesterday's post). He pined for a HD TV for ages. I, being the frugal spouse, told him the TV could not come out of our family budget, so he faithfully saved his personal spending money, and earned extra money doing handyman work for his parents, and bought the TV of his dreams. He built a new entertainment center out of the old one (recognize the doors on the bottom)?

He added a few new pieces of wood for supports, but those came right out of his wood collection in the garage. He even had enough Varathane to refinish it.

It's very pretty, and very functional. My favorite part is that we have now gotten two very nice pieces of furniture out of one set of materials.

Now, I am not advocating that you all fill your garage with woodworking tools and equipment, but I am saying that it can be fun and very economical to take things from your home that you no longer need, or that no longer work for their intended purposes, and find newn ways to use them, remodel them, or upgrade them. I'd love to hear about any recycling or reinvention projects that you've taken on.

A Fun Recycling Project

Here's a fun project that my hubby did the other day for a friend of ours.

My hubby has had a pair of these computer-component lamps in his office at work for years (which he made using lamps he picked up at a garage sale), and our friend has coveted them every time she stopped by. She had been looking for a glass lamp to fill like this for quite some time, but all the ones she found were prohibitively expensive (and by prohibitively, I mean upwards of $100). So, when my hubby found this one (sans computer parts) sitting out in front of our neighbor's house for free, he knew exactly what to do with it.

The lamp was filthy (the house was definitely inhabited by smokers). He had to clean the shade, wash the glass, and polish all the brass. He also bought a new wiring kit at Home Depot for about $10.00.

After cleaning it and rewiring it, he filled it with old computer and electronics components--hard drives, chips, an old DVD remote, anything electronic that he could find. This is a great way to reuse components from obsolete computers.

Our friend's husband contributed quite a bit of the computer components, so it includes several things that she recognizes. We gave it to her tonight, and she loved it!

I love things like this, when you can take something old, and something (or things) that are utterly worthless and come up with something new and useful.

Uses for Page-a-Day Calendar Pages

This is a post I've wanted to write since I first started this blog, but I never found the time to take the pictures before now.

For several years, Santa has left each of us a page-a-day calendar in our stockings. Every family member gets one that fits their interests. The first calendar I ever got was a Mary Engelbreit one, and I just adored the full-color illustrations.

It seemed a shame to either recycle them, or use the backsides for taking phone messages (which we do with our black-and-white calendar pages), so I found something new to do with them: decoupage!
Using just some Mod-Podge, a foam brush, and a pair of scissors, I used the pages to make all sorts of useful, attractive containers. Just cut, glue, overlap as you'd like until the entire surface is covered. Then paint over the entire surface with decoupage glue, wait 24 hours, add a second coat of decoupage glue, and there you go!

I wrapped the decoupaging over onto the bottom of the boxes to give it a clean look, then covered the bottom with a piece of felt. These are some inexpensive papier-mache boxes that I bought on sale at Michaels. I've also used the photo-file boxes that you can get for a buck or two at Michaels.
I have also used this technique on boxes that I have gotten other things in (large boxes of business-sized envelopes are great). I keep most of my scrapbooking supplies in these boxes, which look cute on my computer desk shelf.
I even covered a cardboard magazine holder to use on my kitchen counter as a paper recycling bin. It's much easier to put paper to be recycled here, then empty it in the big garage bin when it gets full.
This past winter, I found some really awesome papier-mache letters at JoAnn. I did up my initials in Mary Engelbreit pages and took them to my office. My boys liked the idea so much that they had me do letters for their room. My youngest chose his Frogs calendar pages (sorry, the picture is a little hard to see because of the flash).

My oldest chose The Simpsons, which I think turned out really great. Both boys have these sitting on the top of their bookshelves in their rooms. These letters are about 12 inches tall, and they come in larger and smaller sizes as well.

I have at least 8 of these decoupage boxes at home, and have given many as gifts as well. They are fun to make, very inexpensive, and definitely frugal!