Recycling? Or hoarding?

We are fascinated by the A&E show 'Hoarders'.  Partly it's because this lifestyle is so antithetical to our own, and partly it's because we have a neighbor who is, herself, a hoarder.

At our house, the rule is, if you aren't wearing it or using it, it's likely to get thrown out.  This presents a few problems:

• We don't believe in sending things unnecessarily to the landfill
• We believe strongly in reusing or recycling whenever possible
• We don't like having trash or things that look like trash lying around
• We like to barter

So, the question becomes 'What to do with this leftover stuff?'  We have odds and ends from various construction projects which are a perfect example.  The area of our house which would be a back porch if we weren't too cheap to actually construct a porch is graded pretty steeply.  We could have built a deck, but that is too costly, too labor intensive, just too much.  However, as an easier approach, we built what for lack of a better word could be called a retaining wall out of scrap lumber bits (none longer than a foot and a half) left over from building rooms for our kids and from the treehouse.  Most of this was donated lumber to start with, so it has now been recycled twice.

We filled in the graded area behind this wall with dirt from the pond dig, and with leaves from our mighty oaks.  Come spring, after we have built a table and chairs (hopefully with recycled lumber), we will mulch the entire area with cedar chips, and voila!  An inexpensive porch made out of old stuff nobody wanted!

To make it even better, it is surrounded by a post-and-wire trellis on which wild grapes are growing; if they do half as well as the wild grapes in our faerie ring area, they should reach the roof next summer.

All of which leads to a request; for those of you living in the Brazos Valley, if you have leftover lumber, leftover cement, leftover bricks, etc., consider a trade:  eggs for your stuff.  Drop us a line and let us know what you have in trade, and we'll see if we can't work out an arrangement to keep your place and Myrtle's place both looking ship-shape.

Happy farming!