Reuse It or Lose It

I just finished helping my friends Big Brian and Rosa do a little updating in his kitchen. New countertops, sink and range were the main additions, and all very nice improvements. The big opportunity, however, came from where things no longer were: the hole the built in range had vacated and the shelves whose doors had long since been removed as a nuisance.The idea was to fill these voids with the great functionality of full extension drawers built specifically to the size of the items they would house. Brilliant! Actually, the brilliant part was that Rosa had kept all the doors and drawers that had been removed from the kitchen from past remodels and we decided to use those for the new drawer fronts, which allowed us to reuse these cabinet parts and match the existing cabinets perfectly. Everybody wins.

The next phase of the reuse it extravaganza came from the counter tops. We used beech butcher block countertops. Easy to install but come in set lengths, which means we had to cut them down and ended up with some nice scraps. A little cutting here, a little routering there, some sanding and badda bing: cutting boards. Industrial sized cutting boards at that. Sweet!

And the last phase in our masterful reuse it project was the building of the new drawers. Drawers actually take a lot of wood and are usually made with one half inch sides. If you use real wood and not plywood, half inch boards means lots of planing and lots of saw dust. Well, collect and bag all that sawdust up and you get what? Mulching material. Granted maybe not the best mulching material but it is organic and does break down into the soil. Brian poured it on some paths in his garden and what you have is an amazing minimal waste project.

Good job Brian and Rosa.

This entry was posted on 23. July 2008 at 17:13 and is filed under Designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.