If there is one thing I take seriously, it is recycling. When you've been brought up in a household of nine people, you are taught from early on that nothing gets wasted and almost everything gets reused.
Food scraps go into the compost for the vegetable garden, old cardboard boxes become toy castles, and old clothes make great cleaning rags.
When I moved to the big city, it seemed as though all that had changed. People threw out perfectly good appliances and furniture just because they were redecorating and the old stuff was taking up room. Fortunately, in the last few years, going green has become the latest rage. Everyone recycles to some extent, whether it's newspapers or just bottles. Blue boxes have sprouted up in every neighbourhood, even the ritzier ones, and suddenly urban gardening is in (to use up all that lovely compost!)
Since Hubby and I are doing some renovations to our house, I of course had to look for used articles that could be reused for our purposes. Why buy something brand-new, with built-in obsolescence, when a gently-used item will work?
That being said, living in an older building creates a few challenges. For instance, the bathroom medicine cabinet, which is mirrored, is an odd size that none of the stores seemed to carry. Then there was the matter of having to renovate the entire bathroom in order to install a larger (or smaller) cabinet because ceramic tiles needed to be cut or replaced.
After much hunting, I found a ready-to-assemble cabinet without mirrors which could be made to fit on the adjoining wall. The problem lay in finding a mirror which then could cover the area where the former cabinet was, so that no major retiling needed to be done. Well, again after much hunting, I tracked down a mirror at Ikea that would do if we framed it.
In the meantime, however, ever since I moved into the house, I've had my eye on the neighbourhood curbsides for materials thrown out after renovations. Since most of the townhouses are identical, it stands to reason that what fits in one would fit in another. Needless to say, after six years, nary a medicine cabinet had been discarded.
The day before I planned to buy the new mirror, I happened to spy what looked suspiciously like a medicine cabinet propped up against a neighbour's wall. What to do? Should I knock on their door and ask if they were planning to throw it out?
I decided that might be a bit bold, and the best plan would be to wait until the night before the trash was collected, nip down to the neighbour's curb, and check if the cabinet was there. So...just after dark, I slunk there, looked around carefully, and spied....a perfectly good medicine cabinet. Hefting its weight in my arms, I trotted off back to my house.
Now came the most important part---were the dimensions right?! Sure enough, with a bit of ingenious carpentry, it would fit exactly where the old cabinet was recessed into the wall.
After it was installed (by Hubby), I felt very proud of myself; not only had I saved myself some money, I had prevented another item going into a landfill, and to top it off, would be able to recycle some of the materials from the old cabinet!
It's all in a day's work for a veteran recycler!