Home Economics Ingenuity 101 — Re-purposing

In case you haven’t fig­ured it out yet, my moniker of choice, Sub­ur­ban Wife, is a lit­tle poke of fun at myself. On the sur­face, I am very much a sub­ur­ban wife. We live in the ‘burbs and I’m a wife. Not only that — despite the fact that I’m employed full-time, I con­sider myself to be a home­maker (aka a house­wife). But that’s only on the sur­face. Under­neath this SUV-driving, suburb-dwelling house­wife exte­rior beats the heart of some­one who despises every­thing about the sub­ur­ban exis­tence. I’m a tree-hugging, environmentally-aware, urban-renewal-advocating, reduce-reuse-and-recycle, mul­ti­cul­tural seek­ing, bleeding-heart liberal.

And in case I haven’t made myself clear enough, I hate the conspicuous-consumption, disposable-society atti­tude so incred­i­bly preva­lent in Amer­i­can sub­urbs. That “Wal-Mart” atti­tude of buy-cheap, destroy-and-replace-with-another-cheap-item rep­u­ta­tion that sub­ur­ban­ites have so deservedly gained.

So what’s all of this have to do with Home Ec?

Lately I’ve been pon­der­ing some­thing I call re-purposing. You know the big three: re-use, re-cycle, and reduce. Well, I’ve added re-purposing.

I’m big on re-purposing. That is — tak­ing an item that still has lots of life left in it but for one rea­son or another is no longer needed for it’s orig­i­nal pur­pose and find­ing a new use for it.

Here are a few quick examples:

• The Daughter’s Radio Flyer walker wagon. Now that she’s six­teen, she’s moved onto a dif­fer­ent type of vehi­cle <wink> But the walker wagon is still in great shape. Sure, I could have sold it or given it away, but it has served for years now as our library book repos­i­tory. It sits on one cor­ner of our liv­ing room hearth and holds all library mate­ri­als when not in use.
• 

  re-purposed wooden chair

  The small wooden chairs from the kids’ wooden table and chair set. Now that my “baby” is 5’10″, it’s prob­a­bly a safe bet to assume the kids are done using their child-sized table and chairs. In fact, not only have my chil­dren out­grown the set, but so too have the nieces and nephew and the grand­chil­dren. So now we use the chairs as night­stands and bookshelves.

• The Son’s Lit­tle Col­orado wooden step stool, once used in the bath­room for reach­ing the sink, has long been used to hold the humid­i­fier in our mas­ter bedroom.

Last Fri­day I was struck with a re-purposing inspi­ra­tion. I’m not sure that it really qual­i­fies as re-purposing because, well, you decide for yourself.…

For some as-yet-unknown rea­son, The Daughter’s bed­room is the cold­est room in the house. It’s sig­nif­i­cantly and notice­ably colder than The Son’s bed­room right next door and our bed­room just across a small hallway.

For about 3/4 of each year, we all use down com­forters on our beds. A few years ago The Daugh­ter tried switch­ing to a spare queen-sized duvet but I vetoed that prac­tice as it was really too big and awk­ward and kept falling off the bed. But the twin-sized duvet she’s been using is quite admit­tedly not sufficient.

So for about two years I’ve been con­tem­plat­ing the pur­chase of a new heavier-weight down com­forter. Every once in a while I’d check sales, com­pare options, and gen­er­ally window-shop. But new, good-quality duvets are expen­sive and I’ve been reluc­tant to lay down that kind of cash. Truth is, out of the 6 down com­forters we own, I’ve only pur­chased one of them. All the oth­ers are hand-me-downs from my own youth or were brought to our union by The Husband.

It’s been really cold lately so I was again pon­der­ing the pur­chase of a good-quality, high-fill com­forter for The Daugh­ter. Then it occurred to me, she’s using a twin and The Son has his “new” twin (pur­chased for Christ­mas back when The Daugh­ter was using a queen-sized duvet), so what hap­pened to his old twin-sized com­forter? A quick search of the stor­age room ensued and viola! There it was.

The answer was so sim­ple and easy. 1 + 1 = 1 or in other words, 1 older medium-fill twin com­forter plus another older medium-fill twin com­forter equals one still-older-but-now-double-thickness twin comforter.

If you have any expe­ri­ence with down com­forters you know what I knew — I couldn’t just stuff both duvets into twin duvet cover and call it good. No, the duvets had to be stacked and attached to each other to keep them from bunch­ing up inside the cover.

An hour on the couch (made less mun­dane by simul­ta­ne­ously watch­ing a Net­flix Instant View­ing episode of “Crash”) was all it took. I used a sewing nee­dle and thread and sim­ply tacked the two com­forters together at the four cor­ners then once along the short side and twice along the long sides and, as I said, viola! The deed was done; the com­forters were re-purposed or at least regen­er­ated into a sin­gle double-thick cover.

The Daugh­ter loves her “new” thick-fill duvet and now sleeps snugly through even our cold­est nights.

Related posts:

1. Day 132: Flan­nel Sheets, Alter­na­tive Care, and Emergencies
2. Day 16
3. Day 96: Co-Pays, Admis­sion Fees, and a Tar­get Stop
4. Day 166: Colonics, Under­wear, Gro­ceries, Bed­ding, and Speech Therapy
5. Day 161: Gifts, Gas, Gro­ceries, Art Sup­plies & A Clean Car