Make It

We spent all weekend furniture shopping, storage-solution hunting and cleaning (when I wasn’t dealing with three tickets for the exact same thing given to me within 12 hours). We had an extra apartment, you see, one we moved 80% of our stuff out of…and left it to be The Land of Things We’re Not in Love with but Don’t Want to Throw Away. It was rough. We’re on the hunt for affordable storage solutions and, more specifically, a house for our shameful DVD collection that won’t make us look like clutter-loving hoarders.

I like this floating box storage solution from ReadyMade…although I’m not quite sure our crafting skills are sharp enough to attempt it just yet.  Any other ideas? Also, while you’re at it, do you want to build me a weekend and help with some organizing in our new place? YOU DO?! Gee. Thanks.

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We’ve been thrifting. We’ve always been thrifters. I finished my entire last apartment with a car full of clothes, a few pieces of wall art and a $400 budget for furniture and furnishings on Craigslist. It was really cluttered. The furniture we bought lasted two years before we had to call time of death.

Now we’re starting to want grown-up furnishings. We still bought 80% of our furniture on Craigslist, but we bought nicer, newer (read: more expensive). We’ve spent more than we intended and now we have bare walls and some empty spaces and we don’t want to spend much more on things like organization, lighting, wall stuff…the stuff that makes a place home.

I’m lucky that Isaiah is a fantastically rad artist and we have two pieces so far to hang on the walls. For the rest of the wall space, I’ve been hunting for thrift store finds and DIT projects for us to make at home on the weekends. I think I found a few winners. It’s pretty awesome when you show a dude a craft project and they go, “OH MY GOD THAT’S AWESOME, let’s make that.”

Images & Tutorials: Left – honeycomb storage shelves from Design*Sponge. Top Right – letter lighting from Do It Yourself. Bottom Right – woven wooden lamp from Dollar Store Crafts.

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I’ve been watching a lot of this show, “The Lazy Environmentalist” on Netflix. Have you seen it? I also watched my very first episode of “Mad Men” last night. Season 1, Episode 1. It was pretty great, looking forward to getting addicted and watching a marathon this weekend. No, but really, I have lots to do. We’re still moving out of our old place. It’s been 2 months in the new place….but we’re still moving. I can’t believe how slow progress has been, but between buying new furniture and having two cats and a puppy who want to be in the middle of exactly what you’re doing at all times, I’m just glad we have the couches and bed set up. (Although, Tupac rode the mattress into the bedroom while we were trying to move it).

Anyway, since I didn’t learn anything from that first episode of “Mad Men” other than men can be reeeeal assholes, we’ll move on right to ”The Lazy Environmentalist.”

Until a year and a half ago when I took Environmental Science, I didn’t care one lick about my environmental impact. I regularly threw shopping bags filled with the trash from my car onto the highway. I left cans of soda sitting at the park because I couldn’t see a garbage can. While you might think it’s common sense to take care of the world we live in, I didn’t. I wasn’t raised to think it was important. Even now, most of my family is of “The Lazy Environmentalist” Josh Dorfman’s, perspective that they will try to take care of the environment if it doesn’t affect them.

When I heard the numbers in class almost two years ago, I was shocked to think we might already be at Earth’s carrying capacity in terms of the amount of resources available to last us. Oil, food, even water could become scarce if we’re not careful with our resources. Initially, Isaiah and I vowed to have as few children as possible. We want kids, but the rate of growth for Earth’s population is just insane. So that was first.

We changed the lightbulbs in the house to energy-efficient bulbs as they ran out and were conscious of how long our showers were taking. We started with recycling obvious things, paper, aluminum, glass. Then we started turning off the water while we brushed our teeth and buying anything we could in bulk (although I haven’t made the leap to only buying food (especially produce) within 100 miles from home yet). We try to save what we can from being wasted. I think in June we’ll try to eliminate 10-20% of our waste…then in July again…I just don’t want the worm farm. I’m fine with everything but the worm farm.

Anyways, I tell you all that to tell you this: We do what we can, but it’s still not enough. We don’t reuse enough. We don’t repurpose. Partly because most of our clothes and furniture and stuff up to this point was hardly worth giving to a thrift store new…and all of it was used when we bought it.

I want to get better about reusing and repurposing and eliminating the 40 lbs of garbage per week we’re supposedly racking up (I believe it).

3191 Miles Apart did this great tutorial on making balms and salves at home from what you already have. Give it a shot, let me know how it goes.

Image: 3191 Miles Apart to illustrate a tutorial on homemade balms and salves.

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