Rubbish Rescue (and Repair) | A few recent projects

Three quick peeks into my avocation as a Rubbish Rescue Artist:

1.  On trash-night, some neighbors put out cheaply made furniture that was -- not surprisingly -- falling apart.  Even though it was cheaply made, it wasn't particularly bad looking, and so I swooped in to do some rescuing.

There was a bed frame, which I brought into the basement and then disassembled, unscrewing stuff with my much-beloved cordless drill and removing sharp nails with pliers and hammer.  I do love taking things apart!  In this case, what remains is a couple of potentially useful planks of wood and the always-weclome hardware -- screws, nuts, and bolts --, plus four boards that are probably not useful unless I can figure out how to remove the weird metal screw/bolts embedded in them.  

Most of what was left of the bed.

2. The same curbside heap had an under-bed rolling drawer thing (a trundle?), which I initially rescued only because I wanted the wheels.  But I quickly realized that the only thing wrong with it was that a panel had popped out of its groove.  A quick gentle tapping with a mallet popped the panel back in, and then I used the screws rescued from the first project to attach a piece of scrap wood to the brace bar for a little bit of extra support, to discourage further popping. 

The underside of the trundle;
the white bar is scrap wood that I attached
to the existing bar, for a bit more support. 

So now the under-the-bed trundle is under a bed.  And it has awesome wheels.  We're thinking it'd be a good place to store extra blankets.

For both of the above projects, I'm trying to be careful to avoid being a packrat, but it seems like we definitely have space for these and that if I don't need this trundle or the wood slats, I can either (a) send them into the world in a more useful form than when they came into my house or (b) send pieces of them to the landfill after all, where they were headed anyway.  No harm, no foul.

3.  This next quick repair wasn't a curbside trash-pick, but it's a save just the same: when I was untangling aprons fresh out of the dryer at our soup kitchen, there was one apron whose strap had come detached.  It's a matter of moments to fix it with a sewing machine, so I brought the apron home to reattach it.  I love these easy fixes!