One of my hobbies is restoring/building furniture in a zero waste kind of mindset, where all my materials are either from EIF or found on garbage day. Ideally the only waste is my own hours/calories and the electricity (though I do pay the local company for what they assure us is all green energy). If it’s okay with the instance, I’d love to share some of them here. (I think they’ll fit better here than in DIY as I’m not really giving the kind of thorough steps necessary to build one yourself)
I’m fairly active on my local Everything is Free page, which has been awesome. It’s a wonderful community dedicated to helping each other and reducing waste, and my first real step towards meeting my actual community since moving to this city (besides meeting my neighbors in the building and next door).
Awhile back someone posted an In Search Of for a saddle stand. They rented a horse but owned a saddle and apparently you can’t store them flat. They had a sewing machine case they were using for it, but were looking for a towel rack or similar that would look a little nicer.
I have a decent little wood shop in the basement of our apartment, and have hoarded a lot of lumber (and more lumber shows up on EIF every day) so I offered to just build one to her specifications. It was a really fun project, she was super friendly and flexible about the design/timeline, which worked out well because it took me a little over six months to make it – though most of that was time spent waiting for suitable materials to show up.
A quick search of the internet showed two types of stands I thought I could make – pedestal ones, and traditional ones with flat sides on either end. Flat sides were definitely more practical, as you can add a shelf to store things underneath, but they would have required 1”x12”s or something equivalent, which I didn’t have. So I decided to focus on the top and wait to see what showed up.
The slats are cut from old oak floorboards I pulled from a dumpster when a local furniture maker/finish carpenter was retiring and cleaning out his workshop. We got talking and he gave me some nice stuff as well, including some thin slats of some exotic hardwoods neither of us could identify. The hardwoods and oak floorboards I ripped to the final size using a tablesaw and plainer.
The project went on hold for lack of time and materials for awhile, until a neighbor threw away a nice pedestal table. They had disassembled the thing, including stripping all the hardware that normally hinged and supported the two leafs, so I didn’t feel too bad about taking its base right before the garbage truck got there (I took the top too, and plan to use it as well but I’ll get to that at the end)
I was then able to work out a design for the stand using the pedestal. I drew up two endcaps and cut them from some beautiful oak cabinet wood the furniture maker had given me (getting both endcaps out of the piece was tricky). Then, to support all the slats, I cut two smaller versions of the same shape from scraps of an ikea bookshelf I’d used in building an arcade cabinet (a different, more ambitious zero-waste project). The smaller pieces were pine, which wouldn’t match the oak base in grain, but it wouldn’t matter because they’d be hidden by the bigger endcaps and the slats on the tops/sides.
I assembled these pieces, stained them to match the base as closely as I could get it using stains I already had (mostly golden oak I already had, but also some very old stains from my grandparents’ basement which hadn’t been brought to the dump yet, and which helped get the different woods to match) and urethaned it with gloss polyurethane.
To support the upper part I took the last piece of a very warped 2”x”6, I’ve been slowly using up, sanded it until it was roughly square, and drilled holes so I could use the table’s original bolts to attach it to the stand. (I stained it as well). I leveled it the rest of the way and made sure the endcaps would cover it entirely by cutting a notch into either end. Then I set the top part on it, and drove six screws up through the bottom of that into either endcap.
It’s not my biggest zero waste woodworking project, but I think it came out well, and they were really happy when they came to get it which was nice.
This is kind of my introduction to this community - I’ve been reading the posts and checking out the different communities just in this instance and I think I’m really going to like it here! Thanks for putting this place together!
This community actually needs a new mod as ex_06 stepped down as an instance admin a few weeks ago (other life priorities, no disagreement or anything like that). If you want I can make you a mod here.
Wow! So I’ve been on reddit for like 10 years now but I haven’t actually modded anything of any real size in that time. But I have helped run a discord group and it’s part of building a community so I think I’m up for it. But I’m brand new here and I feel like I should take some time to get to know this place before I try to help run it. Could I check in in a week or two, unless it’ll be an extra strain on you while you wait for backup?
I do suspect Lemmy will see a bit of an uptick in people from reddit, with some of the changes happening over there at the end of the month - after all, it got me looking around, though I was mostly excited to find a solarpunk community that looked interesting and very organized. How many of the folks looking for alternatives will decide on a solarpunk-focused instance, I can’t say, but if it becomes an issue I’ll definitely do my best to help.
I was specifically referring to the /c/zerowaste community not the entire slrpnk.net instance :)
/c/zerowaste is basically un-used, so I don’t expect there to be much moderation work. I was actually considering to remove it as there is also /c/diy, but apparently you liked this “sub-reddit” better ;)
Oh! Good to know! I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that moderation would work at that level but it makes sense and sounds very reasonable! I’d be happy to run zerowaste, especially to keep it open
You are now a mod here. Feel free to adjust the side-bar text to your liking :)
Thanks!
If it’s okay with the instance, I’d love to share some of them here.
I hope it is, because I find this highly inspiring. Very nice job! Also, I need to figure out if there is an equivalent to that “Everything is free” page in my country. Is that a dedicated website/app ?
Thank you so much! In this case it’s actually a facebook page (legitimately the only reason I still have facebook) but the community there is really good and well-run. At least in the northeast US, “Everything is Free <Townname>” or “Buy Nothing <Townname>” is the common name format. There are some multi-town groups as well. There are also sites like freecycle, but I think there’s value to setting up these spaces in sites people already inhabit.
I’m a huge advocate of the group/format. It’s been a wonderful way to meet my community (or at least a very vocal part of it that cares about reuse etc) but it’s also a wonderful start to breaking the endless of stream of extracted resources into manufacturing into now-unneeded products into garbage (while someone else is on their way to the store to buy the same thing). It’s also helped me with some instincts/waste-aversion that might have lead to hoarding. it turns out I don’t actually need to keep things, I just don’t want them to get thrown away.
It’s also wonderful seeing a community actually taking care of each other. Building ties and learning about each other, what we need, our skillsets. Through these projects and the course of helping my next door neighbor give away a literal housefull of stuff, I’ve met several other woodworkers, a paper archivist (specializing in comic books) a fire extinguisher inspector, a person who fabricates arcade games from scratch, a bunch of tech people of various specializations, and others I can’t even remember at the moment.
It’s also helped me with some instincts/waste-aversion that might have lead to hoarding. it turns out I don’t actually need to keep things, I just don’t want them to get thrown away.
This sounds very familiar. One of our solutions was to donate a lot of stuff to thrift stores, though that does often not work for raw materials like wood. The next hurdle I need to overcome is to actually try to build something with such material and become more handy, as now I often feel I’ll just waste the material because I lack the skills. But I guess that even failing would be good use of such material.
If you ever want any suggestions or advice, I’ll be happy to give it! I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, between woodworking, furniture refinishing, and some carpentry. I also do some metalworking and was an apprentice blacksmith for a minute, and I generally just love making stuff and talking about making stuff.
I love using scrap/trashed material because it lowers the risk so much.
I recently started refinishing furniture I find on garbage day (I’m still pretty crude at it, mostly using stain and brushed-on polyurethane - something my friends who are much more into refinishing wouldn’t be impressed by). People around here often put their furniture trash out a few days early, in case someone will take it. I like to wait until the last morning and grab it right before the garbage truck shows up so I know no one else wanted it. Then if I really messed it up, nothing would be lost, it could go right back in the trash. It helps me remember to take risks, even if I haven’t actually had any go badly.
