Maybe if You Turn It Upside Down?

Spring has us rushing all around, trying to soak up the sunshine while accomplishing all that needs to be accomplished. I love this time of year. I much prefer tackling outdoor yard messes than inside house ones. This is also the time of year when the garage door gets pulled open and you discover how much stuff you've put in the garage over the winter.

Before my frugal, eco-friendly days, we would drag down one of our four garbage cans and just chuck anything we got our hands on. Purging like that felt good. Unfortunately we discovered that sometimes things we could have used got tossed. Now the process is a little different. Everything gets a second look before a decision is made.

Here's a couple of examples from this weekend:

An old stereo cabinet that dates back to my childhood
It turns out my husband's record collection has grown to the point where this is useful again. It got taken to the cabin to replace an overflowing milk crate of records. Not a new use but a good one.

A metal rack that is used to create an extra shelf in cabinets
This is one of those things that looked great in the store but never worked in our cabinet once we brought it home. Like an idiot, I bought three. I'm really into cast iron pots and pans but they are pain in the tush to store in a lower cabinet because of their weight. (The angle to remove them would be spine snapping.) I put one rack on the counter next to my stove and voila, I have a new shelf to store my cast iron on.

A drip rack from a roasting pan
This has very limited usefulness once you stop cooking meat! Although you can use it to cool baked goods on. I took this and put it under the rack I mentioned above. Now if I spill water on the counter I will avoid rust rings from the cast iron that had been sitting directly on the counter.

The stuff we can't find a use for in the forseeable future gets freecycled or donated. But we're always saying things like, "maybe if you turn it upside down it will work."