I had been dreaming of a new terrace for months. One slightly bigger than what I had fronting my abode—with a roof and an outdoor sink for washing hands and doing dishes out in the green during the warmer months. I had it mentally planned out to the last detail, but I needed to wait. No need to build it before we moved my Wagen to it’s new spot. I am not very good at waiting.
But, as always happens with time passing and waiting, the day arrived at long last. We moved my Wagen. We put my old terrace/steps construction (wow, remember when I built that? feels like a hundred years ago, which apparently translates to “about a year and a half”) in front of our sleeping Wagen to replace the wobbly pile of stumps that had served as steps before. They had gotten dangerous. I had fallen off them twice, which is not fun at the best of times and is really upsetting when your body is pumping with prego hormones and you were running out the door to throw up.
Once my Wagen was in its new spot and propped up off its wheels courtesy of the lovely Frau Doktor, I was itching to build my terrace. I had a big pallet, and scrap wood left from a dumpster diving excursion at the building supply store. But I couldn’t actually lift the pallet or bend down to screw on the leg supports. (This is the kind of thing I mean when I say things like “and pregnancy has rendered me pretty useless, physically.”) I needed help. I don’t particularly like asking for help—for weeks I used a chair as a temporary step instead—but when I finally did, two of my buddies agreed to do the job. So while I ran around fetching tools and screws, they put together this sweet little number for me. Aren’t they awesome? I feel lucky to have friends who will build me a terrace while I haul this baby and its water cave around in my abdomen.
So: the project:
First they put four leg supports on the pallet (which was a bit complicated on the right side because of the mini hill there). But the pallet was a little unsteady, so they screwed a flat peice of wood on top of it to add more stability. All the wood was dumpster dived.
Messing with the height of the support legs:
The “can it hold a human adult or is it about to break” test (preceded by the “will it break if I dance on it test”):
And the finished project, complete with lucky black cat:
It’s not entirely finished—as you can see there is no roof (well, not one big enough to cover the whole thing) and no outdoor sink. But those can wait for spring when I have my body back to myself and I can lug another pallet home to extend the terrace further in the direction of our sleeping Wagen (making the path between our two Wagens shorter), put on a bigger roof, and install the outdoor sink.
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.
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.
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.
To my horror, removing a bowl from a shelf the other day revealed stains on the light colored wood. Water stains. Oh crap. A leaky roof is one of my worst building nightmares.
But! Panicky though this discovery made me, I am already fairly certain as to the cause. You see, I never entirely finished battening down the roof onto the siding, and this corner is particularly exposed to the elements. (I know, I know. All the builders out there are shaking their heads and asking why I didn’t get this done last fall. I am asking myself the same thing.) Below is a shot of the same corner from outside. No doubt rain water has just been dripping out of the rain gutter and blowing right in.
Looks like I have my first spring building project. Luckily I still have a bundle of wood from the time we dumpster dived at the building supply store, and it is probably just the right thickness for screwing onto the top of the siding and then screwing the metal roof onto. Or so I hope. Next up: coating the siding with another layer of fuck-off-rain-water and finishing the floor insulation.
How do all you people with houses manage it? It’s all I can do to maintain my little ship, and as you can see, I barely keep up. This fact, above anything else, is what I imagine will keep me in a Wagen for years to come. There is a lot to love about this Wagen life: how much time I end up spending outside, how little I need to spend on heating and rent, how cozy and flexible the space is. But in the end what really seals the deal is that the scale of the building allows me to—more or less—handle all the maintenance myself. The thought of dealing with a house (and having to learn about things like septic systems, plumbing, and stone walls) is intimidating to say the least. Three cheers for the diy house folks!
I heart tiny houses. So you can imagine my surprise and exhilaration when I discovered that there are heaps of people out there who also love small dwellings, and not just the wägler.* People who are building bizarre-o, beautiful, unique little houses, and people who are blogging about them all over the internet. So many and so much so, that I’ve heard it called “the tiny house movement.” High fives for everyone!
Today This Tiny House featured my wagon project on their blog. If you’ve been a long-time Gorilla reader, you’ll probably recognize the pictures, but the whole thing is really charmingly put together, and I’m six shades of flattered to be featured there among some seriously gorgeous small-house porn. Mmmm. You should really visit their site and click through some of the incredible structures featured there. Like Handmade Rolling Homes (SWOON) and SunRay’s Gypsy Wagon (click here to see some of his other amazing work).
*Wägler is German for “people who live in the kind of trailer that I live in.”
“Sometimes, lost in post-apocalyptic reverie. I imagine that even the landfill may not be the final resting place in the empire of scrounge–that someday, when the present world of mindless hyper-consumption has finally failed, those thousands of tools and bicycle parts and lengths of copper pipe that I know are buried there will be dug, reclaimed, reinvented. In that regard I figure that, as an urban scrounger, I’m practicing for the apocalypse”
-Jeff Ferrell, Empire of Scrounge
Behold the recycled door! Fashioned from a metal car-advertisement board that showed up one morning from nobody knew (or could rightly remember, or wanted to admit) where. Lovers of apocalyptic aesthetics can now eat their hearts out with a spoon (door handle)! Love, love, and love.
So I lied. I tipped back my hat, put my hands in my pockets, leaned back and said, “Woo-wee, glad that wagon’s finished and I can finally think about something else.” And though I am happy that thoughts about the trash book have space in my head again, looking at all those pictures of the finished product is making me feel all gushy.
I look at those before and after pictures, and I get a twitch in my fingers to tell you all about the little things that have made such a small space just the right size for everything I could possibly need. I want to tell you about which things in those pictures were dumpster dived (brag would probably be the more appropriate verb), and I want to share all the tricks of the DIY building trade that I’ve learned over the last year. And that’s probably just what I’m going to end up doing. No time like the present…
As far as building with scavenged materials go, an active imagination is the most important tool of all. Wow. Helloooooo kitschy-sounding statement. Sounds like the kind of bullshit people spout on about at graduations. But it doesn’t make this particular statement any less true.
Objects tend to get stuck in our perceptions of their prescribed uses. That is, we stick them in a specific role with a specific function (chairs are for sitting, curtains are for covering windows, etc) and once they occupy a certain space in our minds and homes, we don’t let them be anything else, however good of a wall a table top could make (or table cloth a curtain could make, or curtain rod an old table leg could make). Once things outlive the uses we have assigned them, they often get tossed instead of re-imagined into places we might never have expected to find them.
Instead of tossing an item past its alleged prime, it could be re-invented, given a second life, resurrected. Dumpsters are full of the tools for a lifetime worth of mad scientist-esque building projects, and you’d never have to spend a dime. (An entirely over-rated activity as it is. Dimes too, could probably be put to better use in other fields.) I reckon that the people who are going to be the best off come the (apparently) impending apocalypse are going to be those who can re-imagine and re-fashion the waste left behind by our civilization into whatever they find themselves needing–a skill not unimportant in, well, pretty much any situation, time, or place.
There are a lot of examples around the wagenplatz where I live, and in the midst of a picture-taking frenzy, I captured a few examples for your consideration. Take this picture of my wood stove pipe. Can you spot the re-invented bit?
It’s the bit of black metal protecting the wood siding from the heat of the pipe. That’s an old baking pan I found on the floor of one of our kitchens, unused, and covered in dust. I traced the stove pipe on it, used an angle grinder to cut out a pipe-sized hole, and screwed it onto the wall. Coincidentally, the strip of metal holding the pipe upright was also scavenged, though what it was in its previous life I am not sure.
Though I scavenged quite a bit of stovepipe from the Sperrmuell (big trash such as furniture and the like) and was given some by friends, I bought this bit of pipe when I discovered that the opening on my new (old–a gift from a friend moving to an apartment with dial-run heating) was too small for the pipe I’d found. Usually I would have waited for the dumpster gods to grace me with a solution, but the chill of winter was too immediate to wait.
Perhaps the item in the next photo is more obvious (though rather tiny):
If you have a vertical chimney pipe, rain tends to get in it, which in turn sometimes creates a gross ashy goo that is especially irritating if it starts dripping back into your fire. And more so than in other configurations, wind will sometimes blow smoke back down vertical pipes and into your room. This is especially dangerous if you are sleeping in said room at the time and don’t notice, or in the worst case scenario, ever wake up again. Above you can see a small pot lid re-purposed as a solution to those problems. (This is also why you’ll see a “T”-shaped bit of pipe at the top of my chimney.)
Three’s company, and I love company, so here’s one more picture of a particularly spacey chimney-goo/wind solution in the form of an old metal lamp shade.
And don’t let the title of this post mislead you: You can re-invent the kitchen sink too. In fact I have one lying in my shed right now. Anybody got a suggestion for what I should do with it?
After having dragged you all along on this year-long renovation experiment, it seems only fair to share the bounty. I am a bit late to the start, and I have been chagrined by your pleas for photographic evidence. You see, I am plagued with a streak of neurotic perfectionism that greatly contradicts my general fondness for chaos, and I have been scrambling over unfinished, unimportant details in order to make trash house (as I fondly like to call my mostly scavenged diy masterpiece) all the more shiny and spectacular for you before removing her virtual veil.
Frankly, I am astounded that I’m really finished—well, finished enough to be sleeping in trash house, lighting the wood stove in trash house, and gazing around the room looking at the physical reality of what I’ve been imagining for over a year. Technically I’m not really finished—someday soon the pleas of my frozen feet will be too loud to ignore and I will insulate the floor—but as far as daily life goes, trash house is ready to have a bottle of champagne smashed against her snow-bobbled buttocks.
So, though I find her innards more attractive in the detailed photos I posted yesterday as a preview, here are some before-and-after pictures for your consideration. May they astound you the way that comparing my memories of the last year to the present astounds me.
My very own sleeping beauty, given to me for zero euro because sometimes people would rather just be rid of something than to do the work of taking it with them when they move. My first task was to insulate the walls. Below you’ll find her stripped and defiled some months later:
And today, parked in a new spot, covered in snow, and bedecked with a wind chime from the beloved Mr. and Mrs. Sprinkles:
The siding in the pictures above was born of an ex-ceiling from the Beard’s mother’s house. The hose carries water from the rain gutter and into the rain barrel that will make watering my garden next summer exponentially easier. The hose is from the trash, the barrel is from the trash, the ladder, the candle holder, trash, trash, trash, etc, usw, et. al.
In the picture below you can see the one side I managed to cover with the original boards (only one side’s worth of boards survived the crow bar’s wrath and my impatience), and the end I sided with boards from Natasha’s ex-ceiling. Most of them were kind of fucked, so next summer will probably see another brief re-siding project. My neurotic side wishes that all four sides looked exactly the same, but since I usually don’t have to look at them all at once, and I like having saved some of those purdy original boards, my neurosis’ twitchy pleas for further symmetry remain quiet enough to ignore.
So friends, you’ve seen the ads, now let’s take a look inside.
First, the climatic before photo. Summer 2009: shortly after hauling trash house home from Rüsselsheim, I filled her innards with huge Styrofoam bits that I intended to slice into insulation-sized pieces. Those blocks ended up back in the trash where I’d found them after I discovered that cutting Styrofoam is a big messy, pain in the arse. Many other objects have come from (and gone back to) the trash since. I even made 40 euros selling what it turned out I didn’t need at the flea market for 50 cents a pop.
Note the small window to your right, the unpleasantly bland wall and ceiling color, and the cardboard-brown color of the floor for future comparison:
Today: wha-la! Lived in, cheerful, and filled with the crap I call my possessions:
As seen when facing in the opposite direction (with my back to the door), before the make-over:
