Desert Wasteland Scavenger: Upcycling Scrap Wood, Metal and Wire to Make Elegant Homesteading Wares TPS-0067

I’ll be talking about this design pattern that I'm implementing using the scattered, scavenged remains of the previous dwelling that was on the property when I acquired it.

Probably built no sooner than the seventies, judging by the style of the rusting beer cans that had been left around, buried partially in the sand.

I’ve been using various materials as base for repurposed upcycled projects. Literally almost every scrap of wood. I organized everything set it aside, pulled out all the nails and sorted all the different types of lumber. I’ve used up already all of the four by fours and two by fours and one by ones and everything.

Everything that was at all sturdy and usable has already been built into different kinds of shelves and racks and tables.

I always think of how the original builders on this site would be proud to know the materials have been rescued and re-used.

It looked like it had been completely abandoned for decades because of how everything was still in place, probably the same as the last day that anyone was here.

Yet it was completely rotted. Not even rotted because there's not even enough rain to rot.

It was just wind swept and corroded from sandstorms to be just the rusted frames of furniture and bed frames.

In the radius of about a quarter mile, all of the walls and roof just strewn in all directions, partially if not fully buried deep in layers and layers of sand.

I’ve been continually excavating all kinds of glass and all kinds of nails and just random metal and splinters. Everything very hazardous but I've got boxes of broken glass, boxes of scrap metal this whole layout of all the different wood materials and different stone panels.

It's all been sorted out, and all the choice cuts of wood, metal and nails have already been used up.

So I'm down to literally some of the last few tore up pieces of boards and plywood sheets and trying to make the most out of them.

What I've arrived at, which is, to me very interesting and worth spending a few minutes to share, because it's something that I would have never, under any other circumstance would have arrived at, this design conclusion or consideration.

Being limited to what's here for now and having a limitation on myself.

From my earliest permaculture design studies, one of the mantras that I learned was that, if at all possible make use of everything already existing on site before you go buy a new items. Make use of on-site resources.

It then becomes a game of kind of earning more permaculture points, at least psychologically and ethically.

One from the outside world is going to necessarily, at this point in the state of the movement, keep score of who is going and buying something when they could have just dug it slightly out of the ground because it was there, reused it, dusted it off and enjoyed the fact that it had a bit of a character, that was slightly aged.

But if it’s still strong enough and safe enough to use...

That was instilled in me early on, and still is to this day, and now more than ever, I’m in these cycles of where I'm trying to get to a point where I don't wanna spend the money to buy new things if I don't have to.

I'm trying to be set up to where I decide what I want to buy that I'm gonna import from the world of plastics and electronics and finished building materials and hardware. Kind of have a sense of what I'm going to want build and be as minimal as possible, and make that happen maybe once a year.

So if I run out of hardware and fasteners then I'm out and I'm stuck at that point,

The hardware store is not just down the street.

I'm trying to see if I can do my first full, I'm gonna call it “buy nothing year.”

I'm gonna get to a point in the next few months, where if I survive with what I have, I will have literally bought nothing for an entire year other than paying for the service to keep my website up, my phone plan going, and taxes.

I bought food in advance. I bought bulk water supplies and containers.

And I've been living this whole year now, about six or seven months or so, and so far so good.

The hardest part is coming up, the hard summer months.

But my water supply is better than I thought it would be in terms of my calculations of what to have on site. Food is also in good supply. There's a couple of things that I wish I would have gotten a little bit more of, but for the most part I'm well buffered even to go beyond that one year point.

I'll be happy if I make it there.

Then I will restock immediately just after that milestone, just to say that I did it and have that as a life achievement.

But again, the stakes are high as far if I didn't get enough batteries, or I didn't get a backup replacement power inverter, which I did do, and which I had to rely on, because the inverter I had for 15 plus years finally died, even though it had survived two previous summers out here.

It finally had enough and, and I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.

But that's why I thought about getting replacements for things, get a redundant backup of that I could afford to.

So hopefully everything holds up, but it makes that game of upcycling what's on site, all the more fun and all the more high stakes.

If I need to build something, I may have to cannibalize other little building projects.

I’ll look around and see, oh, that's not actually structurally necessary, this was probably probably overbuilt, I can pull a couple of screws out of that and pull a board out of that and it's not gonna fall apart, it'll do fine.

So between that and using these last scraps, I've arrived at this this elegant motif of designing these hanging shelves for a spice rack and a rack one gallon water jugs.

I imported natural jute type rope, three strand and a diameter of about a quarter inch. It's not that strong but if you double it up it's fine for a lot of things.

I'm basically suspending and hanging these shelves that are built out of lengths of this scrap wood.

Then in order to build, like you would see one of those kind of farm apple boxes, or something like a fruit box that a farmer would load a truck with.

They were manufactured and put together. I’m trying to approximate that design with the scrap lumber material that basically blows apart when you drill holes and try to cut it.

It's so brittle that half of the fasteners that go into it are just to try to keep it as one piece. That's what happens. But I'm determined. And so I have these very funky, rustic looking, not perfectly even, not perfectly spaced fasteners.

Because you drive a screw through and one at one point there's nothing there, and it just just pops out because it's so shredded, but there's enough bite.

I've made this balance of reinforcing the structure and the load capacity of these shelf type units.

But I'm able to apply this concept across all kinds of different tables and different surfaces.

There’s this metal, it's like a sheet metal that's at a right angle where there's about 2". If you were to hold it in your hand, it would be like an L-shape

It can reinforce a corner and I've used it for building planter boxes with two by fours.

And also protect it, protect me from getting caught on splinters on the edge as well. So kind of like a finishing bracket of sorts.

I've also hammered it out so it becomes a form of metal tape, which you can buy in rolls, which I've used for a lot of things in the past. With that, I've secured bamboo poles that can hold a shade cloth or for securing parts you'd wanna easily slide out or release.

The power of having this metal tape is that I can pound nails through and drill screws through. Then with only a couple or few pieces of wood used in conjunction with that metal tape, I'm able to reduce the need for what would have been maybe three to four times as much wood to complete the function of a box or a shelf or something like that.

I made a little pushcart thing, something to sit on and scoot around in the nursery with, and just this combination of really wonky old tore up wood pieces, and then bracing them and securing them together.

It's this really cool discovery that I'm gonna keep with me.

Even if I was to buy new materials, I would feel now that this is an interesting approach and I wanna go with it.

Because it's easy to find this stuff, certain things, I'll probably never buy again now that I've arrived at this.

Of all the nails I’ve pulled out, maybe 15 to 20% of them are actually still decently usable.

Eventually I might have the proper tool to reset the nails.

But now if I run out of hardware, it's actually pretty expensive. It has been expensive since I've been out here when I did resupply it.

I've restocked on couple different sizes of screws and felt like I had enough nails and I could pull out enough nails.

I’ve done alright with my gauging of how many new screws to buy, and working with the nails that were already on site that I could reuse.

But they do go fast, so I wanna be sparing about it.

So the thing that I established as a design concept, the pattern is to actually use, whether it's baling wire or what I found as a more pliable and less dangerous, because it is pliable, but still sturdy enough, and obviously you can double it up if you need to...this, 12 or 14 gauge electric fencing wire.

It's a lot more forgiving than than what would be the standard bailing wire, which tends to be, if you get poked by it, it's not gonna move, and it's gonna go into you and not bend in the process.

So it's basically, like a rusty nail, however you come at it, it scratches and gouges deep.

I’ve used it to build out a lot of things and have enough of it and on hand for when I need something to be that sturdy.

But obviously, when I use it, I'm gonna be very careful installing it, and I'm gonna bend it in onto itself at the end, so it's not sticking out and making a jagged point.

That's just basic best practices, but I've had good luck with this softer, more pliable, less dangerous, electric fencing wire.

So by drilling holes at key points through the wood and through that metal tape instead of screws or bolts or rivets or any other type of of fastener, which you have to buy and have a supply of, just basically having it be tied off with this wire.

I wouldn't probably put my life on it. I wouldn't build a ladder this way, or a climbing harness or a swing set or anything.

However, for just trying to keep some pieces of wood together to hold a shape that can be kind of a box that'll survive being being driven around if it's in the back of a truck, it can hold sturdy and it can just keep things like glass jars breaking...Keeping things organized and contained.

How can I take a few pieces of wood and keep them from flying apart in the wind, or with me bumping into them.

It can even shift a little bit and have a little bit of play.

It just needs to hold up. One side could be nothing but two pieces of wire that get tied from one piece of wood to the other piece of wood, and it just creates a wire net that holds the shape.

Now that I'm publishing pictures and videos of the project it’s a way to commemorate and kind of walk through this evolution process.

I'm doing a lot under this, under this concept of tactical permaculture and this is just one base, one fort, one project, one demonstration site where I'm learning as I go.

This is my first rodeo in the desert in these extreme conditions.

So compared to other photos of other projects that are gonna start showing up on my website that show my portfolio of what I've done all across LA and other bio regions, it'll make sense how painstaking it is to be doing this out here in this environment.

Knowing from looking at my website, as I fill it out, how much the grandeur of the more temperate projects that I've done are compared to what I've been able to accomplish under these extreme, arid, windy, stormy, hot conditions. Just trying to hold onto every little shred, every little drop of moisture in every little bit of green that I can keep alive.

It's harsh, but I signed up for it.

I'm into it. I'm up for it. Eventually the next extreme adventure that's probably gonna be the next level from this, in terms of extreme is Alaska or something like that, or even if it's nearby in the mountains where they were just massive snowfall.

That will be the next level for me to apply the permaculture techniques that I've learned that are very specific to extreme cold climates.

But for now, I'm working on this, and I'm working with what I have, the materials that I have, and I'm just thrilled with this new, quaint, emergent property of scarcity and repurposing and just scavenging the wasteland and arriving at something that is actually really aesthetically pleasing, if you like the sort of Wild West kind of rustic aesthetic, mixed with a bit of Mad Max post apocalyptic wasteland aesthetic.

And now I know, I mean what I can do. I mean, the, the, the, the price point of a spool of that wire versus the cost of the hardware that I would have just without thinking, I would have said, oh, just the best, whatever.

The standard, basic construction quality hardware it gets expensive.

It goes fast, but I can stretch this wire a long way. I've also harvested different wires from around the site. If there's anything that I'd be happy to continue to buy, it's the wire.

With the right set of drill bits, I can use this wire to literally stitch together what I need for a lot of applications, and enjoy the idiosyncratic, one of a kind nature of things.

And there's nothing more fun than using your hands, working with your hands and tools and getting in the zone and having time fly and taking a design and bringing it into reality in a way that you didn't just buy a kit. You had to make adjustments and trade offs and think harder and be more creative along the way.

Because maybe you did run out of something, or maybe the thing that you thought was perfect broke halfway in between.

And now you're left with a situation where something that was supposed to be a rectangle is now a triangle, but you made it work, and there's a story to tell.

If that's how quaint and simplistic my life ends up being from now on, then I am so all about just being a humble homesteader, and I’ll take pictures and tell stories about fun stuff like this.

I'm going through the process of posting my photos from all of my work, all my, and just one at a time tell the story of what was going on in that photo.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

By the end of going through all my photos, I will basically have the equivalent of a coffee table photo journal in the form of a website.

It’s a beautiful labor of love just to share these crafts and to feed back into all the influences that I had along the way to get to this point.