Once upon a time when the Beard first came into posession of the red trailer (which coincided with me moving to Mainz and us moving in together) it looked like this. And I looked like that.
These are both views looking to the right and left of the door, which is located about in the middle of the trailer. And a side note to save my pride: we did not do the ceiling. Someone who couldn’t be bothered to actually fit the tongue and groove boards together did the ceiling, and it kind of makes me nuts. But that’s another story for another day.
When I finished fixing up my trailer (click here to read the whole story), I moved all of my stuff over to it, and the Beard and I basically lived as if we had seperate apartments across the street from each other. Each of us would come over to visit the other, but our stuff lived in separate places, and each person was the master of his, her own little space. But with Peanut on the horizon we rethought our housing strategy once again. We have painted and built and rearranged, things are nearing completion, and we’re both falling into a new spatial routine.
Trash house (aka my trailer) will be our kitchen, my office space, and (since I am leaving the bed in place so that we can continue to sleep separately when one of us is sick or working late) guest space/extra sleeping space. Since I already use it for all of these things, not much will be changing there.
The red trailer will be our main living space: bedroom and living room and hole-up-here-for-the-winter room, and that’s where the bulk of the rennovation projects have been taking place.
We (and by we, I mean the Beard as he’s done most of the work this time around) started with a fresh coat of paint: purple on the one side and yellow on the other to create a feeling of having two rooms. To further the feeling of two-roomness, I built a floor-to-ceiling cabinet that acts as a partial wall dividing the sleeping area from the other half of the trailer. My logic in this had to do with creating storage space where there previously was none: by building the cabinet out into the room, we gained as storage space a part of the trailer that had only been available for walking through before.
The cabinet isn’t quite finished (still needs doors), but as I know it’ll take me a while to get around to cutting and attaching them, I thought I’d share the photos from the project today. You’ll also notice that we’ve moved the bed to the other side of the trailer (these photos face the same side of the trailer as is pictured in the second photo above). The bed will be further away from the wood stove (con), but it will soon be big enough to sleep the three of us comfortably (pro pro PRO, I love me some wide open spaces when I’m sleeping).
My inspiration for the new cabinet were the built in cabinets in my own trailer (I love whoever built these and put them in because they were capable of an exactness in building that I have yet to master). Here’s a look at them:
building a new cabinet
Whenever I build something, I spend a long, long time sitting in front of the project space and imagining what it will look like, what problems I will encounter, and how to go about handling each step of the building process. So, step one looked like me staring into space for a long time. And step two looked like this (the long beams I bought, but all the short beams were leftovers from the building supply store dumpster dive we did several years ago):
And oh! isn’t that a lovely color for a sleeping room? I think so.
Once the frame for the cabinet was in place I sided it with tongue and groove boards:
And today it looks like this:
Someday it will have doors, and someday the whole thing will be painted, but for now, we’re both happy to have a place for our clothes and a tv to live (the tv being our latest scavenge—before we were using the Beard’s ancient computer to watch rented movies, and let me tell you it was a huge pain in the ass). And I will be happy when I’ve attached the doors that will enable us to ignore the chaos that will inevitably dwell behind them.
Next week: the “podest” aka stage aka raised platform that the Beard built on the other side of the trailer to increase storage space and keep our feet warm in the winter.
Pallets. They’re everywhere. In Germany at least, some of them have Pfand on them (that is, a deposit that you get back when you return them), but all the ones not tied up in Pfand end up in the trash. I’ve used them to build sheds, and I especially like to chop them up into kindling, but making really sweet furniture out of them never even occurred to me.
One of our stops on the Black Diamond tour was an absolutely delicious (gorgeous! let me stay here forever!) squatted tennis court. On the edge of the city but completely surrounded by trees and inhabited by birds, the inhabitants have fixed up the old clubhouse and made it into a pretty little home.
We played outside between an old Russian car (see photo above) and a bonfire whose smoke almost caused a calamity during Silver Dagger when I was certain that the pinnacle of my punk rock career had finally come and I would throw up on an audience–which I miraculously managed to avoid, by the way–to folks sitting on pallet furniture. I don’t know how exactly they were built, so I don’t have any specific how-tos for you, but I took a bunch of pictures hoping that, if any of you were interested in creating your own, you’d be able to figure it out from the visuals.
The morning following the show I watched a fellow work on putting together another bench-table set from across my regurgitations, but I admit it: I was too bleary to take in any of the construction details. That turned out to be one of the worst days in recent record (even though the show we played that evening with Blackbird Raum in Recklinghausen was pretty awesome), the day when I finally gave up on wearing a seat belt and rode the highways from the bed in the back of the van, coddling the pot in which I had decided to keep my head. You know, now that I think of it, that pretty much sums up the whole Black Diamond tour for me: shows awesome, Nikki puking behind the van. Maybe I don’t need to tell you any more tour stories after all…
But vomit aside, if any of you end up building something like this (or have already), share the pictures with us, purdy please with a pallet on top. I for one would love to see what else can be done with them.
Ahoy! Click Clack Gorilla! I’ve missed you but life, as it should, has come between me and my computer recently more often than not. To blame is the sun. It just keeps shining and shining, and it has lured me from my computer and the freckles from the pale winter skin on my cheeks.
Someday soon it will rain, and then I will spend the day writing the hundreds of posts that have been simmering on the low heat of a near-sun-stroked brain for the past few weeks. Until then, look at what this amazing woman did! I’m totally in love! Three cheers for tiny houses and the scavengers who build them!
She also keeps a blog called Forge Ahead. It makes me ecstatic to know that people in America are doing these things. Makes the thought of someday moving back there seem mildly less terrifying.
The riders of the apocalypse will not arrive on horses, as is often assumed. No, their chariots will be welded together out of scrap metal and old shopping carts.
This particular steed—failing in Mad Max character though it is—I built as a birthday present. Inspired by what I had seen in Cologne during the tall bike building workshop, I came home, got out the angle grinder, and chopped off the front of a shopping cart that had been hanging around the Platz. It really isn’t more complicated than that. Slap on some paint, attach a cup holder and a sun umbrella, and you’ve got a sweet little rolling chair/beer cart. Or wedding party chariot, depending on your taste.
The day began with a sweatshirt and a thick wool sweater, but by noon I was down to one layer. What glorious fucking weather! Who says making small talk about the weather is boring? The weather is the most important thing there is. Because it was warm today we worked on the new garden bed. Because it was warm today I wore a t-shirt outside and felt euphoric. You know your culture has become completely disconnected from “the environment” when talking about the weather becomes taboo, something for old folks “with nothing better to talk about.” Pishaw.
The weather! It’s wonderful! Oh! Oh! Oh!
I’d started laying a little wall around the new bed space the day before, three bricks high. Today three of us hammered stakes into the ground and stapled chicken wire to each by way of a fence. It has yet to be tested, but so far appears to be hen-proof.
Afterward we laid cardboard over the entire surface (fuck off weeds), and the next couple of days will be filled with wheelbarrows full of sifted earth pushed back and forth between the new garden and the compost pile (my least favorite part of the process). This is my favorite way to make a raised bed, and the cardboard usually keeps the weeds out for one to two years afterward.
The crowning touch was the creepy doll head with moving eyes, forced onto the top of one of the fence poles to keep away the monsters. Unfortunately, I’ve heard monsters aren’t really scared of little blond girls. No, but when I stumble out of the wagon in the middle of the night to pee, I probably will be.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled dumpster find o’ the week post for this important news bulletin: Click Clack Gorilla is now available on the Love and Trash blog. (Wohoo!) My first post there can be seen here—all the Frankenstein-inspired recycling for the apocalypse ravings you’ve come to expect, with some pictures that will look familiar to those who’ve been around the gorilla block.
Love and Trash is a pretty frickin’ awesome collection of blogs about diy-ing, and I am several shades of flattered to find my writing among such good company. My posts will be appearing there each Tuesday, so keep your mouse poised and ready if you like what you see.
We now return to your regularly schedule program…dumpster find of the week: pretty box turned shoe corral.
I can’t remember who found them, but one day somebody came home with about a dozen of these wooden boxes. Something about the little metal handle on the end of each made me fall for them immediately. Each had a thin sheet of cardboard-y wood that slid in and out on small tracks as a lid, and some had a small metal square meant for inserting a small label.
I had initially planned to turn them into shelves, but decided that they were too heavy to screw onto the wall. Instead one became a shoe corral, and several others were sent to sit in the corner of my shed until further inspiration struck. As inspiration has yet to strike on this point, I’m turning to you, my inventive readers, to ask what should I do with the two in the shed?
It seems like a hundred years ago and just yesterday that an old college buddy dropped by for a few days to say hello. I had just put down the last coat of yacht seal on the floor and the trailer was still empty and pristine. One afternoon she kept me company while I built this bed. Thanks to her you guys get a picture this time around with an actual human in it. That was during the “holy shit I can almost move in” blind euphoria stage, as you might be able to decipher in my facial expression.
I had been saving the wood for this project for months as not long after we pulled my wagon home I had found a homemade wooden bed construction in the trash across the street. I unscrewed all of the slats and put them, along with the two longer beams that had served as a bed frame to the previous owner, in Frankenshed. One of them later replaced a rotten beam in the outside wall, while the rest—along with several other bits of wood dumpster dived at the building supply store—became this bed.
I had been uncertain as to where I would get a mattress. The first mattress I’d had in Germany I’d picked up off the street. But, when I moved into my first wagon, I gave it to the friend who had been kind enough to let me store all my crap in his basement for months and months and months.
A lot of people are squeamish about dumpstering mattresses, but I judge by the area, the surrounding trash, and the mattress itself, and then I take my chances. I wouldn’t, for example, take a mattress from a pile of old nasty (wet/moldy/food-splattered/etc) looking trash because I would expect that the mattress had probably just emerged from the same dark crevice as the rest of the debris surrounding it and/or been laying outside for days.
I found my first mattress in one of Frankfurt’s wealthier quarters, neatly stacked with some other “trash” (re: treasures) that were very obviously being tossed because of a move or an upgrade. I carried the mattress home balanced on my head, and slept well on it for the next three years. The point is, not every dumpstered mattress is full of bugs, but you should do yourself a favor and “read” the trash around it thoroughly before you take one home: your skin will thank you when it doesn’t end up crawling with scabies or bedbugs.
Eventually a mattress came my way in the form of a present from another friend who was moving house. And the rest is trash history. All my pillows, all my pillow cases, all my blankets, all my duvet covers, and almost all of my fitted sheets came from the trash across the street. Come moving day, students just wrap up their entire beds in the bottom sheet, tie a knot, and throw it in the bin just like that. (Rumor has it that afterward they enjoy burning the entire contents of their wallets.) Then along comes a Nikki, who fishes them out, washes them thoroughly, and sleeps happily ever after.
A few days ago the Beard and I passed a mattress store on a walk through the city. Bins in front of the store advertised “Pillows on sale for 10 Euros, Previously 25.” I pointed to the sign and did a quick calculation: Five pillows on my bed, four pillows on the Beard’s. “So if I’d bought all our pillows new, I’d have had to spend 225 Euros, 90 if I’d gotten them all on sale. Which means I’d either have had to work a hell of a lot more, or that we’d only have two pillows between us.”
Quit your job, become a dumpster diver, and wake up to find you’re suddenly living like a hedonist? Not what you’d expected from a career in trash picking, is it?
Calling all scavengers and extreme recyclers…
I’m almost out of submissions for dumpster show and tell, and I want to hear your stories. Take a look in your local dumpster. Take a look around your place. Then take some pictures of your dumpster booty, and send ‘em to nicolettekyle (at) yahoo (dot) com with some words about where and how you found the stuff in the picture and what you’re going to do with it. And for safety’s sake, better put “dumpster find of the week” in the subject line.
Tell me a little bit about yourself if you’d like (I’ll keep things as anonymous or blatant as you indicate I should). Tell me about your first time diving, your favorite dumpster, or anything else that seems appropriate at the time. I’ll take your emails and your photos and turn them into a blog post that will show up here, one each Wednesday until one of us stops caring.
Submitting your photos and words to me indicates that you have legal rights to said pictures and words, and that you are giving me legal permission to post your pictures and quote your words on Click Clack Gorilla. If you don’t hear back from me within a week, it means the internet ate your mail and you should try again.
So in the words of the esteemed Dolly Freed: “It’s feasible. It’s easy. It can be done. It should be done. Do it.” Go dumpster diving and come home to your favorite gorillas to brag about it.
My first thought when I saw this photo could be visualized in the form of a very large black exclamation point. Then, returning to the English language, I thought: well, shit, why didn’t I think of that?
The picture arrived in an e-mail from blogger Nim of Nimcraft: Geekcrafting and Ueberdorking, who said: “This is nothing new to the world, but I pounded bottles into the ground to form flowerbed-esque borders and also to line walkways.” New or not, I was impressed, and rushed off to Click Clack Gorilla in my recycling for the apocalypse superhero cape to share the idea with you.
I asked Nim to tell me more about the process of collecting the bottles and putting them in the ground. “It took about a summer to collect the bottles,” Nim said, “But I got a whole army of drunkards to help.”
“I started out saving beer bottles, but here in the States they make them way too flimsy (in the 6-pack sizes. Once you get up to larger sizes, the glass gets thicker, like wine bottles). That plus the hard ground made for a lot of broken shards I had to dig out with a spade. I switched to wine and liquor bottles only (and softer ground) and it made all the difference in the world.”
“Around my tree I think it took about two dozen wine bottles, if memory serves. The ring is about two meters in diameter. However, the bottles are spaced with rocks, since many a root came into my way. I put the rocks in the spaces the roots caused and called it done.
“A word of caution: if your soil is baked and hard (I live in Texas), wait for a rain or give the ground a good soak before proceeding. I used a rubber mallet to hammer the bottles in, but watch out for pinching the skin of your bottle-holding hand under the hammer. Free tips, those!”
This idea couldn’t have landed on my doorstep at a better time. The same morning that I heard from Nim, I had been gazing out my window at the patch of ground that will become my garden come spring, and wondering if I would be able to find enough bricks laying around to make a little mini fence around the beds. Looks like it’s time to start collecting bottles and soaking off labels.
From my bed I watch a tiny brown bird dropping its beak again and again into the white plastic container that has filled with water, and now ice. The sky is gray, has been gray for weeks, threatening, but never delivering on the promise. One of my housemates walks past rubbing the sleep out of his eyes on the way to the bathroom wagon, and a blackbird lands heavily on the narrow end of the white bin, scaring the small brown bird into flight.
The log I’ve just dropped into the wood stove is crackling softly, and I drink cup after cup of sage tea in bed in an attempt to tame the cold I feel starting in my throat and nose. First I was sick, then the Beard was, then just about everyone else we knew was, and every time one of us thinks we’re healthy, the other one re-catches it and passes it along before we’ve had the good sense to quarantine ourselves. The temperature outside oscillates wildly, and I always seem to be under-dressed, laying myself bare to another bout of the it’s-almost-spring cold in optimistically light layers.
And so, it seems, it is a good time to discuss DIY cold remedies. It takes a hell of a lot to get me to a doctor these days, which means I treat all the little colds and fevers and aches at home. The simplest trick, of course, is to rest as soon as you feel yourself in the downward spiral and to make sure you’re eating well and drinking a lot of water and tea.
My favorite remedy for any kind of sickness is the Dragon Slayer, which consists of a shot of lemon juice, garlic, and chili powder (recipe details at the bottom of this post). It might sound a little gross, but I promise it is not, and it will keep you from getting sick, cure you if you already are, and, if you aren’t, wake you up quicker than a cup of joe (though, of course, not for as long).
The lemon provides the vitamin C I once took in big grainy tablets, the garlic strengthens your immune system (as well as being generally full of health-giving magic—for other garlic fanatics, check out this article about all the crazy super powers that garlic is accredited with), and as for the chili powder, I have no idea what health benefit it offers, though drinking a shot involving it does make me feel like a pirate drinking gunpowder, and I like to imagine that the infusion of bravado adds a little something to my body’s strength.
German homemakers’ lore says that those with a light cold should drink a glass of warm beer before bed. Supposedly this makes you sweat a lot, and in turn speeds up the process of sweating your ills right out of your system. But as drinking a glass of beer right before bed means I will spend more of the night getting up to pee than I will sleeping, I’ve never tried it. But now! On to the recipe!
The Dragon Slayer
Ingredients:
1/2 fresh lemon
1 medium-sized clove garlic, minced
a dash of chili powder
Method:
Squeeze out the lemon and place juice in a small cup. Sprinkle in minced garlic and top with chili powder. Down in one go and marvel at the force of nature that is vitamin c mixed with garlic and sweet, sweet (spicey) chili.
What are your favorite home remedies for coughs and wheezes and winter colds? I’d love to add a few more to my personal arsenal, so please, let the commenting begin.
Recycling for the apocalypse is something like recycling for mad scientists. It’s been called “upcycling” and it’s been called “extreme recycling,” but the punchline remains the same: reinventing items in unexpected ways otherwise destined for the trash. You’ve seen old kitchen bits turned into wood stove bits and old bike wheels turned into chandeliers. And today I present to you: the shower bed.
The house at the front of our Wagenplatz has a bathroom in it, but in my time here it has never been hooked up. Several weeks ago a few folks, tired of having to visit their friends’ apartments to shower, re-attached the shower to the water line. The boiler is ancient and the water is pretty cold, but the shower runs.
But there was a problem. The tub no longer had a curtain around it, and any sign of a shower curtain rod was long gone. Several of us watched from one of the kitchen trailers as two of the folks we live with examined the scrap metal pile. Eventually they selected a metal folding bed and carted it off. When they carried it past the kitchen window a second time, the metal netting that had previously supported a mattress had been cut off, and now the frame hangs above the tub, a perfectly shaped shower curtain holder:
It might be a bit hard to make out in this small of a photo (and without having seen the bed in its original state), but the bed frame is hung upside down from the ceiling, the single-mattress-sized metal frame providing the track for the shower curtain.
Calling all mad scientists…
I’d love to make “Recycling for the Apocalypse” into a weekly post, but I need your help. Have you reinvented any objects that had outlived their original uses into solutions for other projects in your home? Send me pictures and stories of your up-cycling, extreme recycling, and mad scientist-esque projects, and I will share your glorious inventions with the Click Clack Gorilla world. E-mail submissions to nicolettekyle (AT) yahoo (DOT) com.
My favorite remedy for any kind of sickness is the Dragon Slayer, which consists of a shot of lemon juice, garlic, and chili powder (recipe details at the bottom of this post). It might sound a little gross, but I promise it is not, and it will keep you from getting sick, cure you if you already are, and, if you aren’t, wake you up quicker than a cup of joe (though, of course, not for as long).
