Upcycling Wood Bamboo Cork etc.
Recommended materials and sources
- A tetanus shot or booster if it's been a while since your last one. Find your medical records and talk to your doctor this is not a joke
- Heirloom Wood by Max Bainbridge
Wood shavings and/or sawdust from chemical-free wood
- Tinder
- Great for adding to compost
Natural wood
- Apparently one of the editors of Family Handyman had a good idea for this. In this how to get rid of anything article, most of which I actually don't recommend for anything other than the wood idea cause some of the websites are quite questionable (though some of the other ideas are good), it explains what he did with some cedar wood siding that had gotten old. I imagine you could do the same with any natural untreated wood product, or firewood that got too wet, or some brush you had to clear out.
Scrap wood in general
- Raw material for whittling. All you need is a pocketknife, steady hands, maybe some sandpaper backed with duct tape to last longer - or a bunch of dried horsetail and some leather gloves, and a whole lot of patience. Oh, and a liking for whittling or willingness to whittle. The better you get at it the more useful items you can make.
Wagon wheels
- Great for growing herbs. Put a base of cardboard boxes down, several layers if possible with tape and staples removed. Cover that with a bunch of gravel. Top with the wagon wheel and the best dirt you can find, plant herbs, surround them with more mulch. Water regularly or set up a sprinkler system with an automatic timer.
Half-Barrels
- Drill holes in the bottom and prop up on a layer of gravel or on several rocks or bricks to provide good drainage. Fill with plenty of dirt. Plant whatever you want, top with straw and burlap (and rocks) or mulch, water regularly or set up a sprinkler system with an automatic timer.
Chopsticks
- Use as stir sticks for making natural beauty products such as lotions, salves, lip balms, bubble baths, perfumes, massage oils, and creams
- Suspend wicks from them when making candles
- Super helpful for diorama building if you're into that
- If round, can be made into those hair stick things. With the aid of hairpins and hair elastics, the idea is to put up long hair into a bun then secure it with the chopsticks in an X. These used to come with like jewels dangling from the ends, maybe lacquered or otherwise painted, and they usually were made out of plastic. Anyway, you can do whatever you want to them artistically if you like that style.
- If round, they can probably be used as knitting needles. Either as they are, or with the tips sharpened in a pencil sharpener then sanded down for rounded edges.
- If round, paint or dye them, then play Pick Up Sticks
- Do you have a Nintendo DS with a screen protector and no stylus? Use a chopstick
Ladders
- Lean one against a wall anywhere you need to store blankets, towels, or some other item that'll drape over the rungs. You may want to drill holes lengthwise through the top of the ladder and bolt it to a 2x4 screwed into wall studs to ensure it stays put, or even use coat hanger wire wrapped around a couple screws in the wall to tie it on there.
- If you have an entire room or dry dark drafty place for it, with a fan in there, then you can mount this from the ceiling and dry herbs from it
Old wooden spoons
- Make into plant markers in the garden; using any combination of nontoxic paint, sharpie, woodburning or whatever, make labels of them. Then dip them completely in melted wax or coat them completely in whatever conditioning oil you have, even sunflower or olive oil, to help protect them from the elements. Reapply the oil if that’s all you got, maybe once or twice during the season. Vaseline should also work. Or, go with something more durable, such as clear polyurethane UV resistant varnish, though I do not know how eco friendly that is.
Old wooden tool handles, such as rake handles, broom handles, spade handles etc.
- Fasten one to a tennis ball to get rid of shoe smears on floors by cutting an x in the side of the tennis ball and pushing it on there
- Fasten one to a tennis ball, then cover it with a sock (edit 5/22/23 or a paper bag or piece of paper of some kind and a rubber band, so you don't have to clean cobwebs off cloth), to get rid of cobwebs in corners at the ceiling
- About a foot above the bottoms, drill through a couple of these with the smallest-gauge drill bit you have at intervals of about 6 inches til the top. Or, whittle a slight indent around the circumference of each stick at that place. If you have a water protectant of some kind for wood, use it on the tool handles. Fasten twine or cotton string, or hemp string, through one side of each tool handle and then something like four feet across to the corresponding place on the other tool handle. Weave more string through to make a grid, again at 6" intervals or so, tying it at top and bottom. Push down the sticks on either side in a grow bed about a foot down so the mesh bit is what remains aboveground. If you can, get some tent stakes or wooden pegs or similar, and fasten the sticks using the top hole of each and 3 lengths of string to the 12 o clock, 3 o clock, and 6 o clock positions on the right side, then the 12 o clock, 9 o clock, and 6 o clock positions on the left side. It should look like a homemade tennis net without a gap at the bottom. And then plant peas at the bottom. If you treat the tool handles with some kind of water protectant, even vaseline, this should last for years. You can extend this thing's height by wrapping coat hanger wire around the bottoms to create 3-pronged inserts for the ground. Eye protection, shears for barbed or thick wire, leather gloves and good pliers would help a lot here.
3/4" wooden dowel rod about 4 feet long
- Get a bunch of shoelaces and lash one end of a shoelace to the end of the dowel rod. Cover with duct tape to make it very secure. Tie shoelaces together with square knots. Tie the last shoelace on the fishing rod to a crumpled paper ball if you choose. Go fishing for cats.
Old furniture
- Very little furniture made of genuine wood as opposed to plywood or chipboard is truly unsalvageable. Sanding, polishing, painting, shellacking, repairing, screwing stuff back together, sawing stuff, rubbing stuff with mineral oil... you can salvage a whole lot with basic woodworking techniques. And happily, unlike a lot of grey areas of ambiguous stuff, woodworking always makes sense. In fact, master the basics and you can make any piece of good wood, scrap lumber, or even non-chemical-treated pallet wood into a functional piece, be it furniture or tools, and yikes the price of wood lately makes it worth it
Wine corks
Upcycling
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