Up-cycling

There’s a television programme presented by a lady called Sarah Moore, and it’s called “Money for Nothing.” It used to be broadcast at roughly the same time I arrived home from work, and given the programme’s light-hearted nature, it was a good way to unwind whilst siting down and tucking into my evening meal.

The basic premise of the programme is Sarah “ambushes” unsuspecting members of the public at their local tip/recycling centre and asks if she could take their unwanted items, rather than allowing them to be dumped. She then takes the items away and transforms them into something more desirable, before returning the profit generated from their sale, back to the people who threw the items away.

Money for Nothing’s running time of 45 minutes allows the three things that Sarah has saved in each episode, to be showcased. She uses several designers and craftsmen and women, in order to cajole them into transforming the junk into something useful or even desirable, and I have to say they produce mixed results.
It does rather depend on what the presenter picks up in the first place, as there’s a world of difference between starting with a pile of old planks, compared to something like a divan or chest of drawers; but you get the general picture.

As a way of up-cycling it’s good to see what can be done, even though some restorations allow very little wiggle room for a profit to be made. You also have to think that, on occasion, there are people out there with far more money than sense!

Sarah comes across as slightly scatty at times, and the army surplus battledress tunic she wears, might warrant a visit from the fashion police. She’s nobody's fool, even though she does annoy Mrs PBT's, and I’d go as far as saying she’s a very clever lady. She’s certainly got a nice workshop housed in a converted barn, attached to her property, which allows her to carry out her up-cycling and restoration projects.

During the current lock-down, I’ve been doing a bit of up-cycling myself, although rather than hanging round tips (they’re closed anyway), I’m restoring pieces of my own junk. I started with a revamp of my trusty old Spear & Jackson garden fork.

The garden fork was a present from some friends of my parents, which was a gift at my first wedding, over 40 years ago. Several years ago, the plastic handle cracked, but rather than throwing it away, I left it in the shed with the intent of one day replacing it. In the meantime, I purchased a succession of replacement forks, all of which ended up with bent or broken prongs.

One of these forks was manufactured by Wilkinson Sword, so it should have been OK, but the way in which the prongs were braised together, rather than being forged in one piece does leave them vulnerable to stress fracturing, especially when used to lever out a stubborn shrub or tree root.

The solution was to remove the plastic handle, that was riveted onto the shaft of one of the broken forks and transfer it to my S & J one. First I had to drill out the rivet, and that’s what took the time, but once removed it was relatively easy to swap it over;  although I did have to turn down the top of the shaft in order for it to fit. The result, a tried, tested and much used garden fork, restored to full working order, all for the price of a bit of my time and a lot of patience.


Next came an old wooden shaving mirror, which son Matthew has his eye on. That involved a quick and easy repair, with the replacement of a couple of screws, to prevent the mirror housing from spinning round on itself. Now all that’s needed is some paint to give it that slightly distressed look. Mrs PBT’s has some chalk paint on order and has kindly offered to apply the finishing touches - I'll say that Sarah would be proud of her!


This easy restoration was followed by my office chair; the one I am sitting on in front of my computer, typing out this blog post. The seat part of the chair was in a bad way, with the black  plastic, “leatherette” covering starting to flake off, leaving small, but annoying, black specks all over the carpet.  Despite me being responsible for the bulk of the vacuuming in the Bailey household, Mrs PBT’s was becoming increasingly annoyed with these flakes of thin black plastic, so when a solution presented itself, I jumped at it.

Eileen had thrown out her own office chair a couple of weeks ago, as the gas-lift at the base, along with the swivel coupling, had both broken. The chair was relegated to the summer house and it
was only whilst tidying the place up yesterday that the solution struck me. The base of by chair was fine, so I would swap over my flaking old seat for her nice intact one. The only proviso was were the fixing holes in the same place?

Fortunately, they were, and the result is a revamped chair that doesn’t shed black flakes all over the carpet. The irony is that this is the second time I’ve swapped over sections of office chair to create a good one, as a few years ago it was the base of my previous one that had failed. Matthew had discarded his previous chair due to a damaged seat section and was buying a replacement. As at present, exchanging parts was the way to go – so it’s good that bases, and seats appear to be modular.

Finally, we come to compost making; an activity forced on me by our local authority suspending the collection of garden waste, due to Covid-19 restrictions. Until last year, the collection of garden waste in Tonbridge & Malling was free but switched to a “paid for” service to allow the authority to implement a range of other recycling services. 

Along with around 40,000 other local residents, I signed up to have our garden waste collected, and all was running smoothly until March, when the service was suspended due to staffing issues associated with Coronavirus. So, just at the time when everything in the garden was putting on a furious growth spurt and needs pruning or cutting back, the means of disposing of the cuttings and other non-compostable woody parts, was taken away.

My garden waste bin was already full to overflowing, so I had to find some other way of dealing with the excess plant matter. The solution came in the form of two plastic compost bins that I’d bought from the council at least ten year ago. Apart from occasionally dumping my grass clipping in them, along with the occasional bucketful of weeds, I’d more or less stopped using these bins, once the free garden waste collection kicked in.

Now, faced with nowhere to store all the woody stuff, I turned to the bins with the aim of creating some extra space. Transferring material, with the aid of my revamped garden fork, from one bin to another, revealed a layer of nice, friable and well broken-down plant matter at the base of each  container – compost in other words.

This has now all been transferred to the one bin – hard work, by hand, leaving the other bin for the soft stuff and the local authority bin full of pruning’s, clipping and other woody material, ready to be taken away next week, when collections restart.

I don’t know whether composting counts as up-cycling, as basically it is a process that encourages the breakdown of plant material but, as with my other proper up-cycling examples, I do feel I am doing my bit for the environment. And if that helps in these troubled times, then so much the better.