Upcycling Examples

This one didn't take much time, but we used metal rods leftover from our old trampoline, and stuck them in the ground around the plants, which would keep them upright. Then we wrapped leftover jute fabric around the metal stakes to protect them from the cold of winter. One of our perennial plants died, a strawberry plant, but the other, a haskap berry plant, survived.

This was quite easy. We wanted to give a lamp additional height, and we had an old broken hat-stand/coat rack left in the garage of our house when we moved in, and all we had to do was saw off the top of the hat-stand, then nail the lamp to the stand, and viola, a standing lamp with another 3 feet of height.

(Wait, did he say nail the lamp?) Yeah, I did, and don't worry, the lamp had very minimal circuitry, and we only nailed through the casing. It was totally safe. But DO NOT try stuff like this at home without adult supervision)

This was a weird one, but kind of cool. To make a desk lamp more compatible with, say, a computer, we used an old device's USB cable, reorganized the wiring of the desk lamp, and boom! USB powered lamp. 

Though now, we have it set up with a USB-plug adapter anyways, so..

This was a particularly ingenious feat of upcycling, made by my mother, who used old moving boxes to make me a dresser-stand, (when I moved into my room in our new house for the first time), and it actually looked a lot like a wooden dresser, and worked almost as well. Except for sliding out the drawer, which I got used to.

Well, you're probably asking - why not use scrap wood? Well, we ran out, the desk used up it all. Incidentally, on the topic, in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, there were famously recycled-cardboard beds in the Olympic Village, (which were somehow much stronger than their wooden counterparts) to cut down on carbon emissions and resource usage. The beds themselves would be recycled later.

Foldable at its ends

Amazing way to upcycle old fabric, my mom's made quite a few of these.

My sister made this by sewing together two pieces of leftover fabric and an old zipper. Looks like a new store-bought pencilcase!

When my sister and I began virtual school, we put webcams on top of old cheap telescope tripods we had lying around, so we could be a further distance from our screens.

We have this tradition of "camping" outside in a tent mounted on our deck, and watching a movie on a projector screen. To hold up the projector screen, we used the metal rods from an old trampoline, and some other pieces of scrap metal. We used nails and a set of stick-on hooks to hold up the projector screen-cloth. (which we also could have made ourselves, but we didn't have enough white fabric, so we bought it)

Very simple device that took maybe 10 minutes to build. We took the ladder of an old bed, and put 4 holes in it to slot the roller wheels

Actually, this has soil too. But this is pretty cool too. First put some growing seeds in a paper tissue soaked with water (the tissue holds in water - prevents evaporation). Then take two plastic containers - fill one with water and drill a hole in the lid, and take the other, drill a hole in the bottom. Take the one with a hole in the bottom right on top of the other, make sure the two holes align. Put the tissue in the top container, pulling it through the hole so it can absorb water by a sort of osmosis-like action, wicking. Then fill the top container about halfway with soil, bury the tissue completely a few centimetres. Not a lot of soil, just a bit. 

You can also get some of that nitrogen nutrient mix and do your own hydroponics (without soil)