Maybe because I enjoy seeing a creation take on a new function instead of populating a landfill, or maybe because I'm a cheapskate and can't afford to buy new lumber.
I guess there's also the benefit of using the materials as your scape-goat if it ends up looking awful, whereas if you build it "from scratch" out of virgin hardwood and it turns out looking like that birdhouse your dad was supposed to help you build when you were 8, but then he ended up giving you too much creative freedom, resulting in a living space suitable for that one bird with the gimpy wing and lazy eye, the birdhouse that the other birds warn their little baby birds not to get too close to, then a couple years later it gets condemned by the bird building inspector, and if your little 8 year-old fingers had been adept enough to put in windows, they would've been busted out by little bird hoodlums, and the inside would be tagged by all the little bird gangs, until one gray, overcast Friday the other birds would notice smoke pouring out of 1/4 inch gap you left under the roof (because you measured once, and cut twice) and the little bird firemen would get there too late and all that would be left would be a charred pile of scrap plywood and a blackened little bird sneaker that would later be used to trace the fire back to one of those little neighborhood birds who would finally confess that he had been playing with little bird firecrackers in the house, and that little bird would be harshly reprimanded, but go on to lead a happy life as a moderately successful bird tax attorney....well if it turns out like that, it's pretty much all your fault.
So I'm not starting from scratch.
I'm st
arting with a queen-sized head and foot-board that I found on freecycle.com (and was hoping would be hardwood, but ended up being hardwood-laminated MDF, oh well). In the picture, I've already disassembled the foot-board, since I'll only be using the posts from it.Next I salvaged some medioc
re lumber from a local glass warehouse (their plate-glass comes in big wooden crates that they just throw away, I can give you the address if you want). It took about an hour to remove about 47lbs of nails and staples from a medium-sized crate's-worth of boards, and to top it off they've been rained on, so I don't know how viable any of it is for this project. Here it is drying out on the porch.Basically, I'm hoping to build a bench out of this stuff, with the headboard as the backrest, and the footboard posts as the front legs, then use the salvages lumber to build the supports and the seat. I've seen a bunch of projects like this on Instructables and Curbly, and have been keeping an eye out for free headboards, so I guess it's about time to build one. Hopefully it turns out something like this:
And not like this:
