If you are like me, you have drawers, cabinets, and closets full of “stuff” that you no longer use but can’t bring yourself to throw out. My top excuses, in no special order, are: 1) It might come in handy one day; 2) It is still in good condition; 3) It might come back into style; and 4) It brings back memories.
What’s the answer for holding on to this stuff without looking like a packrat? With a little ingenuity, you can “repurpose” these items, making treasures out of what some people think of as trash! When our great-grandmothers unraveled sweaters for the yarn, crafted fabric scraps into a quilt, or sewed a child’s jacket out of an ancient coat, it was called frugality. Most of us would consider these activities distasteful – certainly nothing to brag about. Yet today, such frugality has returned – with a twist. It is now called “repurposing,” and it is “cool.”
Also referred to as “upcyling,” repurposing adapts an item for use in a different context. If you’ve ever covered your post-Sukkos esrog with whole cloves to use as besamim for Havdala, you have repurposed. Often, value is added, as used goods or waste materials are processed into something far better than the original. In this win-win situation, you get to add flair to your home or wardrobe, experience the joy of creativity, and save big bucks!
Everything Can Be Something Else
With Purim just around the corner, you might want to keep repurposing in mind for children’s costumes. I have a friend who converted an old red dress into a British soldier outfit and a knitted poncho into a Mexican serape. A gypsy costume is easy to do with a colorful skirt (or skirts), strings of beads, long shiny earrings, and a headband. If you don’t have the materials in your house, visit your local thrift shop for skirts, men’s jackets, funny hats, jewelry, belts, purses, even wedding gowns.
Ever shrink a good wool sweater by mistakenly running it through the washing machine? Turn your dismay into joy by creating a felted project. Hot water, soap, and agitation mat wool fibers together to form a thick fabric that does not ravel. You can then cut it out and turn it into mittens, hats, purses, scarves, and children’s jumpers and jackets. You can even make a couch pillow or reupholster a chair seat by securing the felt in place with a staple gun. The thrift store is a good place to find wool sweaters. Wash them in hot water and soap, and dry on high heat.
T-shirts, another thrift store staple, are a particularly rich resource for repurposing. Combine one or more T-shirts to fashion a more attractive shirt or a skirt. Cut into squares to make dishcloths, aprons, or quilts. Cut into strips and braid for headbands, rugs, and scarves. Or insert the strips into backing to make colorful latch hook rugs.
Jeans are a favorite repurposing material. Take advantage of the pockets and make a tote bag or purse, children’s clothing, or a wall hanging to store small items.
When a favorite dish breaks, save it for mosaics. In fact, hammer it further to make smaller pieces. Glue the pieces from different dishes and ceramics onto flower pots, pieces of plywood, picture frames, even furniture. My friend made a beautiful mosaic mirror by gluing broken dish pieces around a mirror and grouting.
Chests and Chairs
If you’ve browsed in a high end furniture store lately, you’ll notice that some of the most expensive pieces are “distressed” – that is, they look old! Decorator magazines feature dining tables with purposely mismatched chairs! Why not transform your own old furniture into one-of-a-kind creations, too? Paint your mismatched chairs the same color, and they’ll fit right in around the Shabbos table. (Or, paint the same chairs in different colors for a cheerful breakfast area.) Paint old chests or coffee tables tables a bright or subtle color. You can even paint them with stripes, stencil them with a design, or decoupage the surfaces with cutouts from wrapping paper or other decorative papers. Replace the knobs, if you wish, and you have a unique beauty. You’ll find instructions for various techniques, like glazing, distressing, and decoupage, in library books or online.
You can save lots of money and express your creativity by turning old furniture into something else entirely. Hang an old mattress spring on your wall as an oversized message board. Convert a chair with a wobbly leg into a swing by cutting off all the legs, painting it a cheerful color, and hanging with ropes from the porch or a tree. If you have a chest with sticking drawers, remove the drawers and paint the chest frame for use as shelving for books or knickknacks. Use the drawers for under-the-bed storage, especially if you attach casters. Another, especially imaginative, use for a small chest is as a dollhouse. Take out the drawers and you have “rooms” you can decorate with your little girl.
Other unused/unwanted items can be made into interesting home furnishings. Turn wood pallets, abundant at salvage yards, into a platform bed or a coffee table. Attach boards to a wooden ladder, and you have a bookshelf. Need a bench for your entrance hall? You can make one by topping an unused coffee table with a fabric-covered foam pad. Or, attach three mismatched (or matched) chairs to each other, paint them the same color, and lay a cushion across them. One of the wildest ideas I found online – albeit one that requires more serious skills – was a real vintage car, complete with tires, which had been repurposed as a bed!
Blackboard paint has become a fad. You can buy traditional black or a colored blackboard paint to turn a cabinet or kitchen door into a blackboard, where you can write menus, reminders, and grocery lists. Or paint a section of wall in the playroom and let the kids scribble away. Save even more money by mixing your own blackboard paint; just add two tablespoons of non-sanded tile grout to one cup of flat latex paint.
Making the Most of What She Has
My coworker, Hindy, has repurposed everything from the yogurt containers she uses as refrigerator storage to a linen closet, where she stores her spices and essential tools on metal shelving she bought at a yard sale. “Who says you can’t store spices in a linen closet?” she asks rhetorically. “I also converted a broom closet in my kitchen into a handy dish cupboard by adding shelves.”
A few years ago, Hindy bought a shed from the Amish, lined the interior with shelving from top to bottom, and uses it to store her Pesach and Sukkos boxes, among other things. “It helps minimize the clutter in my house. Shelves and over-the-door hooks are big in my house. It’s all about creative use of space, making the most of what you have.”
Hindy sees potential in everything: “My kitchen is really teensy. I have very limited surface area, so I often use my opened oven door as an extra countertop. Sometimes I’ll place a large cutting board over the sink to create another countertop. My mother-in-law, a”h, once gave me a small metal cabinet. I covered it with a sheet of plywood, sponge-painted the whole thing to match my decor, and now I have my own makeshift kitchen island.”
Hindy’s penchant for repurposing has carried over to her cubicle at work. To create a surface to comfortably rest her mouse, she simply opened a top drawer, laid a small rectangular lap desk over it. Voila! An ergonomic L-shaped work area for under $20.
The Repurposeful Life
Rabbi Shmuel Simenowitz, executive director of Project Ya-aleh V’Yavo, a Torah-based, environmental education program, has been repurposing and upcycling before these concepts became the “in” thing to do. “At some point in our adult lives, my wife and I decided to walk away from the ‘uber-gashmiyus’ (super-materialistic) lifestyle we were living in New York,” explains Rabbi Simenowitz, who now lives on Wallis Avenue and attends Congregation Beth Abraham. “I was a lawyer, and she was a high-powered corporate executive. We came home from work one day and couldn’t get into our own driveway because it was full of cars – the housekeeper’s car, the nanny’s car, the landscaping guy’s car, the barn helper’s car, the paralegal’s car, and an associate lawyer’s car!
“We decided then and there that enough was enough. We moved to a farm in Vermont, where we lived for a number of years. We began to simplify our life, trying to live on less and enjoying what we had more. It was our version of ‘hatzne’a leches im Elokecha’ – leaving a softer footstep on the world. We grew most of our own food, doing all of our farming with huge workhorses. We even saved rain water for use in the garden during droughts.
“Every week, we would go down to the transfer station with our garbage and other discardables,” continues Rabbi Simenowitz. “The locals referred to it as ‘the dump.’ We used to call it ‘the swap meet,’ because there was as good a chance that we would come home with something as bring something down. I once saw an old metal futon frame which I immediately imagined as a horse stall divider. I mentioned it to one of my friends in town. He told me he already had dibs on it and that he intended to use it as a hay rack. That is repurposing in a nutshell!”
A friend once gave the Simenowitzes some furniture that her father had built some 40 years earlier. It had sat outside for 40 years and acquired a regal silver patina. They disassembled it and threw it through the planer. Underneath, was some absolutely magnificent, water resistant hardwood, called bocote. It was a bit hard to work with, but they ended up making many little projects with it, including a beautiful candleholder which Rabbi Simenowitz uses every year for his father’s yahrtzeit.
“We have repurposed so many items over the years,” recalls Rabbi Simenowitz. “An old cabinet door with a few broken tiles glued to it and some hooks screwed into it, becomes a beautiful key rack. A 12-pane sash window becomes the perfect picture frame for some old family photos. One of my most ambitious repurposing projects took place right here in Baltimore. We live in an old house with interesting roof lines and doghouse dormers. It created a space on the third floor with little nooks and crannies that had been used for storing luggage and Pesach dishes. I always thought it would make a great study. While I was visiting my farm in Vermont, I heard that an old barn was being demolished at a nearby farm. I went over with a friend before the wrecking ball hit (quite literally) and we dismantled and salvaged one of the walls and some of the timber frame from this 150-year-old structure. I brought the pieces down to Baltimore, and we installed them in the attic (complete with the hand-hewn beams) creating this beautiful, stark, and private space where I can learn, write, do counseling, or just escape. I bought an old cast-iron sewing machine base and fashioned a desktop out of a roughhewn wide plank from a maple tree which had been tapped for maple syrup and still had the original tap holes and the dead sapwood surrounding the holes.”
Rabbi Simenowitz puts a Torah spin on repurposing and upcycling. “If you don’t look at recycling, repurposing, and the like through a Torah prism, then you’re simply Martha Stewart or Suzy Homemaker making pretty flowerpots out of used paper towel holders. Jews have been nursing the concept of repurposing since the prophet Yeshayahu exhorted the Jews to ‘repurpose’ their swords into plowshares.
“There is a certain amount of cleverness involved in repurposing,” Rabbi Simenowitz concludes. “As they say, the difference between being clever and being wise is that the clever person knows how to get out of the situation that the wise person would never have gotten into in the first place. If you find you are accumulating too much clutter, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate your needs. Ask yourself if there is someone who might appreciate an item that you no longer love more than you do. Perhaps there is a gemach that might make better use of an unwanted item.
“That being said, I see repurposing, recycling, or reusing as a challenge. For example, when my son Shlomo became a bar mitzva, we wanted to make a statement that one could be a responsible steward of the earth without sacrificing core Torah values. Rather than figure out what to do with the leftover food from the simcha, we decided to be more proactive and try to eliminate waste ‘lechatchila.’”
The Simenowitzes posted signs by the lavish buffet and on each table with the following poem:
Boruch Hashem, there’s plenty of food,
To heighten the simcha and lighten the mood,
Have seconds and thirdzees – hey, knock yourself out!
As long as you eat it and don’t throw it out.
So before filling your plate, please take a small taste
To maximize pleasure and minimize waste!
“There was no waste, and considering there were more than 250 people who joined us over Shabbos, we generated less than one bag of garbage. (There was no food waste, and we composted virtually everything else on our farm.) I’ve spent much of my life trying to transition from being clever to being wise. It’s the ultimate form of upcycling!”
ãMargie Pensak-2014
