Junkyard dog.

Giving rubbish a new life.

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I’ve written before about the various creative hobbies I find myself dabbling in. While I was still in school, I attended extra-curricular sewing and knitting lessons (my cricket coach nearly fell over when he learned this upon asking why I was five minutes late to practice one day). One year, I participated in an after-school club in which we made mosaics. At home, I made little figures out of modelling clay (often stolen from the movies I watched: I remember making the Lord of the Rings characters, Stitch and the Minions). In high school, I started making functional things out of material. In the tenth grade, I repurposed a piece of leftover fabric my aunt had lying around (she was in a furniture-flipping phase) and turned it into a pencil case for myself. I was especially proud of the zip. In university, I even tried my hand at redesigning a shirt of mine. I removed the narrow, blue piece of fabric that sat beneath the buttons on a white button-up and replaced it with a rose-patterened fabric. I also replaced the navy buttons with white ones, bar the very bottom button, which was red. It wasn’t especially en vogue or well done, but I took pride in it at the time, certainly. I also modified a pair of jeans which had worn through in a few spots, such that it had a green sunflower bandana underneath large rips. My grandfather, who retired while I was in high school, worked as a buyer for a shoe manufacturer, which meant that he had cupboards full of leather samples. Naturally, I took a shot at leatherwork, making a low-profile wallet for myself, among other things. A good friend of mine that I met in university was an excellent leather craftsman, and I eventually gave him rolls and rolls of the leather that my grandfather had initially given me (at my mother’s partial disgust, I think, since he only cleared them out of his garage at her insistence—I suppose she wasn’t pleased to see his clutter make its way into her home). A total dreamer, highly detailed and a fanatic for all things flamboyantly masculine (moustaches, motorbikes, well-made knives, forestry, red wine), he made truly stunning leather items. He gave me a leather pouch for my twenty-first birthday. It’s in the drawer of the desk I now write at.

There’s a YouTuber I enjoy watching called Beau Miles. He’s an Australian outdoor maniac who happens to be very similar to both my father and this leather-crafting, moustache-touting friend of mine. He goes on wild ‘backyard adventures’, as he calls them, like planting one thousand four hundred and forty saplings in twenty-four hours (which is one a minute for those of you keeping score at home) and choosing to walk the ninety-kilometre commute to the university he lectured at. He’s a big advocate for recycling. Yes, the throwing your plastic bottles in the right bin kind, but he’s really into a much bigger, more radical kind of recycling. He finds and holds onto junk for years. Things like rusted old nails and bolts, chicken wire, old wooden railway sleepers, scrap sheet metal. He squirrels it all away in his barn (he lives on a small farm) until he can use it all to make something new. In his most recent video, he makes a stunning office for his wife underneath an old oak tree in the corner of their property. He builds the whole thing himself, only using the junk he’s saved from landfills and picked up off the road. He spends something like ninety dollars on some paint and silicone sealant, but the rest of the cabin, with a fence to keep the cows out, a patio, a lovely desk, a rainwater collection system and a wood-fired stove, is made completely of what other people deemed unfit to keep around. He’s done this before, renovating his office at the university only using old desks and bookcases that other departments threw out. He built a bench in the woods using only stuff that locals dumped in that very forest.

Almost all of the creative hobbies I engage in now sort of make use of the same system. Last year, I built a chair out of reclaimed wooden pallets (though it ultimately collapsed due to my lack of woodworking experience). The bed I’ve slept on every night for five months, I built using reclaimed pine (or possibly beech) that I pried the rusty nails out of myself. The wallet I made for my girlfriend, the wallet I made for my mom and the updated wallet I made for myself have all come from scrap leather. My latest project entails sewing squares of fabric that were thrown away by the upholstery at work together into a patchwork, that I will use to recover my chair that I found on the side of the road. Something about seeing value in the things others overlook feels rewarding to me.

Beau says that he believes that his desire to reuse the old junk he finds, turning it into useable, characterful, often beautiful things, is that he identifies with it. He sees that the old furnace is a little dinged up and has rust in a few spots, but it’s still got plenty of life in it. He reckons he’s the same: a little dinged up, but still working just fine. I don’t know the fella, but that seems about right. I think that might be my philosophy about all people, and a good few objects, too. We are valuable despite the rust and scratches we accumulate. I think my reason for hoarding items bound for the tip stems from believed potential. That old oak sideboard could be a brand new dining room table, if you only gave it the chance. I’m in favour of seeing the potential in everything, perhaps especially the stuff, and more critically, the people, that we so thoughtlessly throw away.

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That oak sideboard thing wasn’t a random example; there is a real oak sideboard that lived in my girlfriend’s mother’s house that I disassembled (read: destroyed) upon request. I dream of turning the wood into a dining room table. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.