by Christyl Rivers

Created on: September 08, 2010   Last Updated: March 06, 2012

Re-purpose your life.  You will have a better one!  Re-purpose household items, save money, time, and your mind.

Find fulfillment in knowing you are aligning with nature's values of economy, efficiency, creativity, worth, and most of all abundance. Turning trash to treasure is NOT a huge sacrifice, silly, or low class.  People who recycle trash to treasure are often extremely creative.  People who make an old lamp into a table leg are having fun, and preserving resources at the same time. Those who simply keep bottle caps for crafts, or for an entire line of beaded lamps, are using the gifts nature gave them, both in resources made valuable again, and the creative spirit from within them.

Bottle caps can become beads. Think beaded curtains, contemporary jewelry, label tabs, buttons and more.  Plastic bags are so "last week's dead marine life." Instead hand sew wide pants legs into easy to re-use shopping bags of denim, or canvas.  Bottles, jars, and boxes are easy to cover in fabric, paint, or fiber board and paper. They live useful second lives for organizing clutter, storage, and/or plant pots and creative gift containers.

At least three mosaic artists in south Hawaii, take all ceramics, including cups, plates, glass, and tiles that would otherwise go to landfill.  They have created phenomenal walls, walks, and flooring in green-minded, but fabulous homes. Save your splurging for investing in high quality.  Use your other present things in some of the following ways.

Paint paste board boxes with paint left over in your garage, for fun and funky storage.  Make a pile of old books or magazines into table legs, or the table itself.  It is a cool conversation piece.  Old carts and trays can be re-purposed into table tops.  Invert a bowl or colander into a lamp shade.  Arrange treasured hats, even shirts into a wall art display.  Broken mirrors (wear gloves!) can be mosaic-ed into reflecting art, seven years of great luck guaranteed!  Old compact discs also work for this, and make terrific coasters, painting templates, and more.  Use all bottles, cans, and jugs as storage containers for pencils, or whatever.  A high shelf in the garage can hold these small jars, bottles, and stored items.  How cool would it be if you made that shelf yourself from an old bed frame rail, sofa, futon, or table board?  You will find your perspective changes from feeling buried under a burden of trash into seeing new purpose in almost everything.

Remember the motto: "Use it up, wear it out. Make it do, or do without."  This is lost wisdom from before the days of trashy disposable values. Contrary to how the marketing industry sees you, (as a sucker) you can reclaim value, resources and pride.  Honor all those things you treasure, whether it be your old aunt's clock made into artwork, or your childhood tricycle made into a table base.

It's good for you, encourages positive role models for everyone, and let's you hear and see the purity of the sunlight making forests rather than just being borrowed through CO2 to make junk and toxins for our landfills!

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