"It's not hoarding if I find a use for it", or Tales of Resourcefulness

Whenever Mia needs to be formally admitted to the hospital for one of her infusions (every 6th dose or so) we get a little bucket full of hospital toiletries in her room. Bath wipes, individually wrapped toothbrushes, etc. Big packages of pee pads for the bed.

Anyway a nurse told us that anything that doesn’t get taken or used gets thrown away for hygiene protocols and to not be bashful about taking stuff.

One of the pee pads is under my kitchen sink while I deal with a minor but persistent leak. I used one of the toothbrushes to scrub some mold out of the grout in my shower.

What random crap have you acquired/saved/scrounged and what ingenious ways have you put it to use?

15 Likes

Fabric mostly, and a bunch of resistors and caps for a one-day amp build

4 Likes

5 gal soy sauce bucket for a trashcan, milk crates that housed records turned the other way to become shelves, big sticks into curtain rods

6 Likes

one of the old doors from a kitchen cabinet rendered extraneous when I moved the oven is now painted black and blocking up the unused fireplace

2 Likes

Do you uncover the fireplace during winter or is it permanently disused?

I get cat litter in those big rigid plastic containers and I use them to store all kinds of gardening things. I have one for sand, one for gravel, and one for fertilizer, for example.

When I watched the making-of feature for Mad God I noticed that Phil Tippett uses the same containers in his stop-motion studio.

8 Likes

uncovered in summer to get some air in, the flue is open but the leaf (brick wall) separating it from neighbours has fallen making it unsafe to set a fire

1 Like

I use my old cafe bustelo cans for flowerpots
and of course Danish butter cookie tins for sewing storage

3 Likes

I need to get a bearing out of a bike clutch cover and don’t have a slide hammer to remove it with, some people have suggested stuffing a bunch of bread into it to push it out, so I’m going to try that.

4 Likes

Reminds me of this documentary I watched about a guy working as a transporter in Africa and there was a leak of some kind from his truck (maybe axle grease from a CV boot?) and the solution was stuffing bananas in there constantly, dude was buying huge bushels of them from gobsmacked locals along his route

4 Likes