The Housegleaners: A DIY Freestyle Fixerupper Remodel Blog Focused On Salvage, Reuse, and Upcycling

I reuse, and reuse is good. Man, English is hard. Same spelling, different pronunciations. And don't you want to say royce ? You know, like the pitcher, Jerry "Rolls" Reuss? An umlaut here would help: reüse. And the verb could be spelled reüze. There, fixed it. I reüze, and reüse is good. Today was all about it. I finished the front deck planter, constructed from 1x8 cedar boards I salvaged when replacing a fence for a client a few months ago. The 6 legs are pressure treated lumber of various dimensions gleaned from here and there. I built two six foot long U-shaped sections separately and connected them in place at the large center posts. Eleven plus feet long, two feet tall, and 16 inches front to back. The legs sit atop the ground and the box has no bottom, with inch gap at lower edge for drainage. Plus you don't want your cedar in direct contact with the ground--that's how a lot of these boards rotted in the first place. Cedar weathers well, but it does rot. I...

Back in our Kalakala foundry days , I was often the dummy. No shade. When you pour molten metal, a red hot crucible (kind of like a fondu pot but full of bronze instead of cheese) is held above the mold in a shank, a long bar with essentially a cupholder in the middle and two handles at one end, a single handle at the other. The person with two handles controls the pour by tilting the crucible, the other one is the dummy because all they do is hold up their end. It's an ingenious design because it eliminates the possibility of working against each other. It was nice having Frank here to lead the electrical work because I could revert to being the dummy, leaving him to do the brain work while I puttered around making dinky moves such as cross-bracing the attenuated carport or insulating between the as yet unheated den and barely heated dining room. I even had time to sneak a smoke in the woodshop.  Smoking is super dumb but I enjoy it every once in a long while because nicotine re...