DAY FORTY

There is a door on my patio which is not a patio door. 

It's been there for almost a year, leaning against the wall. It's a heavy duty, formerly external door, in fact the front door, which at some point became an internal door by the addition of a porch to the front of the house. It's glazed, fifteen small panels, and the stiles and rails are made of thick hardwood. It's on the patio because earlier this year I replaced it with something more suitable for the interior of the house.

You could say that the door was recycled from it's duty as a front door, and the reason it is still on the patio is because I have plans to recycle it again, this time using the frame of the door to make another door to fit the space under the hall stairs. Almost every day I say I am going to set about dismantling it, removing the glass panels to be reused in some as yet unglimpsed project, and cutting the remainder to size. One day I shall be correct in that statement.

This sort of repurposing is to me the very essence of everyday creativity, and saves money and resources to boot.  That doesn't mean it is cost free however.

First, if you are anything like me, there is the cost of the constant nagging to and of one's conscience continually telling you to sort things out, make something with that rusted wheelbarrow you put aside fifteen years ago with the intention of making some piece of horticuturally themed art. If it isn't that it's the many wasted hours trying to come up with an idea to repurpose something which is really a very long way past any usefulness. There isn't much that can be made with a handful of dust and rotted fibre after all. And if it isn't that there are the pangs of guilt to be endured when after a great exertion of the will you actually manage to throw something away. I still regret some of those decisions years after the event.

On top of this nowadays can be layered the reality of the amount of waste and ecological damage caused by overconsumption. As far as my own habits are concerned this has the effect of making a virtue out of a compulsion, but the message is no less important for that.

Even I have my limits however,  I draw the line at some things: Recycling left over ends of soap, for example. Various clever wheezes involving alternatives to commercial cleaning products.  Ingenious and creative some of the ideass may be, but from experience I can affirm that bicarbonate of soda and lemon juice are no match for their laboratory designed and tested replacements.

See, there is a line, though it cannot be placed with precision, between wanting to make the most of resources, or to refashion something new from exisitng objects, and wanting to accept the standards and hygiene of the Tudor period. When we had no alternatives then bicarb and lemon were perfectly acceptable, but there is no need to fetishise the past or the 'natural'; there are reasons we move on from things.

I realise such arguments can be turned against my repurposing obsessions. We have modern alternatives, why not use them, some would say. You could buy a door for your understairs. Well actually I couldn't. I could buy someone's labour to make it, but they just don't have peculiarly shaped and odd sized doors sitting in the local DIY warehouse made from recycled front doors.

And this is the point. 

There are some things which capitalism and commerce cannot provide, at least not at scale thankfully. That provides us with an opportunity, a crack in the edifice of consumption which invites us to escape its soul-sucking embrace, to be human, to craft and create things with our own hands. Each one of us who makes or creates anything of our own, repurposed or not, helps to prise that crack open a little wider, making it just that bit easier for the next person to squeeze through.

Onwards...reflexively.

Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons. Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported