A word about recycling

No, not a long treatise about how it's very important to separate your glass, cardboard, metal and food waste from the countless tons of plastic wrapping that everything arrives in from the supermarket.

And given the skips-full of rubble, offcuts of brick, waste cement, scrap wood, etc, and so forth that this project has already generated (before we start demolishing any existing walls), we're not exactly in a position to get too preachy, are we? In fact, given the general extent to which our house is operating at half speed presently, it's becoming quite a hassle to even keep up with the usual level of household recycling. When you have precisely NO free space in the kitchen, given the choice between waiting for a "batchload" of food scraps, or cans, or whatever to build up and just chucking it into the main bin, it's a bit of a no-brainer.

Ho hum.

Anyway, this was not meant to be a rant about that sort of recycling... back to the plot. It's the weekend, so we have no builders but somehow even less house, because we're readying ourselves for operation Knock-Down-The-End-Wall-Of-The-House (OK so the name needs work).

What we have done, though, is manage to indulge in a little recycling of a different kind. To this end we have been lucky to procure four doors from a house down the road that is being knocked about by builders even more than is ours. Our immediate issue is that the style of internal doors we have in the house (the original ones at least) don't appear to exist in a form that you can buy anymore. Unless you include spending vast amounts of money on getting some custom made - which we don't. As you can imagine, this left us with somewhat of a problem. Two recently added (as in "in the last 20 years") internal doors were already boring plain panel doors which didn't really suit the house - made worse by the fact that the door handles were about 2 feet lower than all the other ones. We were hoping we could put that right with the extension and not repeat the mistake with the additional doors we were adding.

So, when we found the chap down the road chucking his out, we jumped at the opportunity. OK, so they're not pristine. Indeed one of them has an interesting hole in the middle which is going to need a little thought (current favourite idea is to replace the panel with glass). But they do match. Allegedly they even fit.

Similarly, we'd been thinking about getting some desks for the kids to have in their new bedrooms. Number One Son especially had asked for a real school desk with a lift up lid. The only place we'd seen anything previously was Ikea, but we managed to find someone who had just obtained an entire schools worth of desks and were selling them off, so we grabbed three. Inkwells and slightly rude grafitti included. Bargain.

Four doors and three desks for £70 is a nice thing to have and hurrah for recycled materials. The past is clearly the future. Or something.