The 3 "R's": Retail, Recycling & ReUsing

We are having a “attic” sale, in case you haven’t heard, beginning on Sept 17.  I have been charged with getting the attic (storeroom area with a teeny tiny attic space) ready for the sale.  It’s mostly a job of organization, and I'm kind of into that.  OK, who am I kidding?  OCD me is so excited he might pee his pants!  It's like a theme park thrill ride for OCD me.  Imagine all that clearing out, cleaning up, labeling bins and shelves!  Seriously, that is living the dream: a place for everything and everything in its place.   
Since I began working at The Frame Shop & Gallery, I have been aware that Owner is a re-user and a re-purposer of things.  It's a good quality especially in a businessperson.  It was not an oddity to me to discover Owner is a re-purposer because my dad was as well.  She has repurposed many items especially for the storage of scrap moulding.
While working on the attic, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my dad when I saw several big, old, metal coffee cans erupting with some leftover mouldings.  You see, my dad saved a lot of stuff. He saved plastic milk jugs out of which he could make ice blocks for the ice chest or he would fill them with concrete to use as anchors. He saved coffee cans, lots of them, which, in the words of Pooh, can be "a useful pot to put things in". I think he saved every Styrofoam coffee cup he ever got, and he did reuse them sometimes for coffee or to sprout seeds to be transplanted to the garden. He saved pieces of packing Styrofoam to make "corks" (bobbers) to use when fishing.  He was the king of repurposing items, and as such we, his children, often laughingly and lovingly refer to him as "the original recycler". If he could conceive of a way to make an item serve a new purpose, whether that ever came to fruition or not, he saved it.  Were you to open his trunk or look in the bed his truck, you would find any number of things he had saved because he could use it for fill-in-the-blank someday.  Someday rarely comes when you have too much saved stuff as in 143 styrofoam coffee cups.  At some point, it really does just become junk. 

God bless my mother.   

Owner, like my dad, can find a use for almost anything others would likely discard without a second thought. As it happens, I have a bit of the same bent. I wash and reuse Ziploc bags unless they've had onions in them; you will never get that smell out.  I save bubble wrap.  I have actually saved Styrofoam which I reused when packing for my last move.  Don’t misunderstand:  While I appreciate the art of reusing, and I engage in it from time-to-time, I also am a fan of getting rid of extraneous stuff.  My sister might disagree after having seen my garage, but in my defense, there is only so much stuff one can cram in the trash (or recycling bin), and I didn’t have a truck to haul it off.  Regardless, reusing a few milk jugs is one thing, but having a stash of say 10 or 15 is unnecessary.  How many anchors does one man really need?  There’s a fine line between saving for reuse and an audition for “Hoarders”.  Thankfully, Owner doesn’t seem to have my father’s affliction of over-saving everything; we are cleaning house!  Out with the old and in with the new!

Now, I’m off to the shop to make ready the “attic”.  I hope I get to see some of you during the sale.  We have much to offer, and the prices just can’t be beat!  33 Year Attic Sale – Sept 17-22.