Enginero.com `en-jin-neer-o`

That’s almost a hard topic to read, but bear with me. It will make sense to you soon enough. First and foremost, I need to provide some background information. My wife and I moved into our new home in October of 2007. There were many things about the new house that we really loved and of course a few things that we didn’t. One of those “didn’ts” was our kitchen pantry. The previous owners had taken the wonderfully large pantry and used 8″x12″ pieces of lumber to make a big cubbyhole type of storage area. It had a very kindergarten feel to it. I wish I had a “before” picture to show you, because it was quite the sight to see.

As you can well imagine, the pantry update was one of our first priorities. The morning came for me to begin tearing out the “matrix of cubbyholes” and I had planned to do what I could to save the wood. You just never know when wood, even used, will come in handy. I tried to be meticulous in my demolition; opting to pull nails out rather than sledgehammer boards to dislodge them from their awkwardly designed home. The end result was a blank canvas to start with and one that eventually turned into my completed project:

Ok, so now you understand the recyclable, but what about the frugally:

It was my intention all along to reuse the wood. At the time, I didn’t have any big ideas about what projects I would use it for, but I knew it was going to come in handy. I guess it was about two weeks after completing the pantry that the first project came into play. My wife had asked me if I could make a window box for our cat, Felix. We have a recessed area where the window sits in one of the guest bedrooms and my wife had noticed that Felix was jumping up on to the ledge alot, but he just doesn’t fit. Here’s why:

Felix is a 22 pound Maine Coon cat that thinks he weighs about 5 pounds. He’ll try to fit into any spot he wants to be in without a second thought to what he might knock over or how he could hurt himself (typical cat). So, we had two motivations; keep Felix off of the small window ledge and give him a place to sit and look out.

My third motivation was one that comes from years of living with him. He is too lazy to always seek his scratching posts, so he will sometimes scratch on the carpet. Large Main Coon cats don’t just scratch on carpets, they rip into them… That’s how I knew that this new project needed to involve something quasi-scratching post like for his scratching needs and my sanity.

So, what is the frugal aspect? Here’s what I was able to come up with using only a small portion of what we lovingly call “pantry wood” and the minor cost of a piece of carpet scrap:

As I said earlier, this was only the first thing that I made with the pantry wood. I hope you’ll stay tuned for the next installments in this series of “how bad wood turned good” or “ugly does not equal trash”.

Do you get excited about how you can live frugally by recycling? Have any tips to share with the rest of us?