Twice Upon A Time...Recycling Ideas

With a little imagination and creativity, you can turn ordinary furnishings and accessories into unique and stunning budget home decor.

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Recycling Junk and Architectural Salvage for Chic Home Decor

Recycling junk into chic things for the home is fun and it adds great style to the decor. It also keeps those items out of the landfill sites.

Creative designers and homeowners are finding all sorts of ideas for chic home decor items, using ordinary junk that many people would simply send to to the landfill sites. In fact, those landfill sites are good places to forage for things that could be turned into something entirely different. Most human-made objects can have a second or even third life for other uses. Here are some tips and ideas for re-creating those things most often discarded.

Creating With Old Doors
Old doors have numerous uses. The simple hollow doors can be turned into sewing and craft tabletops. Glass doors can become cabinet doors, or can be hinged onto a cold-frame in the garden. Vintage multi-paneled doors can make great coffee table tops, and several could be turned into a wardrobe or cupboard with good carpentry skills. When old pine is stripped of layers of paint, the wood is beautiful and warm – well worth saving from the landfill sites.

New Life for Old Dining Room Chairs
Old dining room chairs can be given a second life with a few fix-ups. For most rickety chairs that get tossed in the garbage, the problem is loose chair legs, missing spindles or worn and torn seat covers. Loose chair legs may simply need glue and clamps as they dry. Missing spindles can be replaced.

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The chairs can be given a chic and shabby look with coat of white or creamy white paint and the seat coverings can easily be replaced. Thrift shops often have inexpensive upholstery weight fabric for those homeowners who are on a budget.

Vintage Lighting Fixtures
Vintage lighting fixtures can be re-invented, using components from several fixtures. For the most part, the nuts and bolts are standard or the same sizes and all can be re-used in the new creation. The components include all the different decorative pieces that slip onto a hollow brass or steel bar hidden within the fixture. This hollow bar is the piece where the wire is pulled through.

Creating a funky new light fixture, whether for the ceiling, or table lamp, does require some creative thinking and a lot of trial and error before actually wiring it up. Lighting is easy to re-wire, but it's advisable to get a professional if in doubt.

Read on
How to Hold an Annual Vintage Cottage Chic Sale
Junk Style Decorating
Decorating with Junk
Architectural Salvage
Architectural salvage of all kinds can be used in home decor. Newel posts make great giant candle holders. Add a 12" square of a wood board to the top, as well as wider base for sturdiness and the homeowner could have a plant stand. There are numerous types of architectural salvage including anything from used bricks to Gothic windows.

Old salmon-colored bricks make wonderful garden paths and are useful for edging the garden beds. Gothic windows are art pieces on their own and could simply be hung on a wall or placed in front of a large picture window.

Junk can Have a Longer Life
The key to recycling junk for home decor is to look at a piece and think of how it can be re-used. Ask yourself how it could still have function with a little work, if it could be re-created into a beautiful art piece or re-used in a manner other than its original intention. Most junk can do at least one of the things above. The owner will be creating something unique for the home as well as giving that "junk" a longer life, saving them from the landfill site.

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Public recycling, Part II

OK, I have great photos to post from the Garden Writers Association Plant Delights Nursery visit this morning (totally wonderful), and our visit to the JC Raulston Arboretum this afternoon, but I'm inspired by Russ's comments on yesterday's post to make my reply a post for today.

Russ,
I'm glad to hear about your efforts, and I'm going home to try to encourage our community businesses to add recycling to their mix (my small city has curbside recycling, but the commercial waste disposal folks who service the food businesses apparently don't.)

Over 20 years ago, I remember talking to a college class about how aluminum can recycling was energy-efficient, yada, yada. We're kind of slow to get with the program.

And I'll look into the ClearStream Cleartainer, too. Sounds excellent.

Another concern to me is all the paper stuff that we generate at these meetings.

I've got a whole bagful of paper that I didn't ask for, as well as paperboard from various small packaging things that I've consumed (containing the coffee extras in the room, for example). I'd recycle this stuff at home, so why not while traveling? At least at this meeting, I drove, so I'm able to take things home to recycle.

I've brought along my stainless steel coffee cup, too, although I've been glad to see that the convention center is using ceramic cups, etc. And Panera Bread, the caterer for our breakfast this morning, minimized waste with paper packaging of breakfast 'sandwiches' although I think there were plastic plates for the pastries.

But, this evening, the barbeque dinner was on divided plastic plates with plastic water and drink cups. Yuck. The dinner was fine, but why can't we complete the cycle somehow?

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Public recycling

At home, we recycle everything - cans, bottles, cardboard, paper, glass, and plastic. Anything that's fresh and organic (minus grease, meat, and bones) is composted. So when traveling, and in this case, attending a green industry conference (Garden Writers Association), I'd like to be able to recycle, too. Sometimes my car is like a mobile recycling center, bringing home plastic soda bottles, paper, etc.

To their credit, the Raleigh Convention Center recycles cans, bottles, and plastic, as did the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at a lovely reception this evening. The Convention Center has slots for newspapers, too.

But what about my banana peels and apple cores? And the waste (paper plates, uneaten food, napkins, etc) from our lunch today on the exhibit floor? And all the extra paper stuff and packaging of materials that exhibitors push on us.

Nice to have much of it (thanks especially to North Creek Nurseries and American Beauties for the cool Vernonia 'Iron Butterfly,' Lonicera sempervirens 'Major Wheeler', and Hibiscus moscheutos 'Torchy'), Renee's Garden, Ferry-Morse, and Baker's Creek for wonderful seeds, but I definitely appreciate the All-America Rose Selections folks that give us our 'press packets' in a small jump drive -- after viewing and potentially using the info, we can reuse it as a portable drive (unlike the throwaway CD's).

And why are all of the plant giveaways packaged in cute plastic bags instead of compostable paper? We did get lots of giveaways in reusable totes, but they're the sort that last for a couple of weeks with anything heavy, not heavy-duty tote bags. I guess I miss the old canvas totes (at least they were biodegradable).

OK, maybe I should be happy with the recycling bins, which are quite impressive, actually, but I'm a cranky environmentalist. I want compost receptables, too!

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