Last week I wrote about a few of the reuse projects at our house. Today I’d like to show you a couple more, this time in the kitchen.

When we bought our house the kitchen cabinets and counters were set up in a U-shape. The prior owners had installed new counter tops and when they did, they set up a large half-circle coming off of one leg of the U. They had counter-height stools set up around the half-moon and presumably used this as an eating area because there was no room for a kitchen table. This setup never really worked for us, though. Neither my husband nor I really enjoy eating while perched on a stool. Once our girls came along, the height didn’t really work for high chairs or booster seats and it wasn’t possible to talk to everyone seated there.

What we needed was a kitchen table. The half-moon would have to go, but even with it gone, the table would have to be longer and more narrow than the standard kitchen table. After a bit of woodworking, my husband was able to make us the perfect sized kitchen table out of some old wood he had in the garage.

The same wood that made our square foot garden boxes . . .

. . . was used to make our new table:

The table is rustic, which is what we were after, and it’s working great for us. There’s plenty of room for everyone and no one has to balance atop a stool while eating.

The second project in the kitchen is in the pantry. I’m blessed with a large pantry, but it’s so deep that getting to the things stored towards the back of the shelves is a problem — not to mention having to move everything in front of an item to get it out. The solution was some scrap wood and a few J-hooks my husband recycled from old gymnasium mirrors. He ended up building some shelves on one side wall for canned goods and more shelves on the other side for large pots and small appliances.

The pink things at the bottom are the girls' little rolling pins.

I promise, the fire extinguisher is there because my husband is safety-conscious, NOT because of my cooking. . .

Again, I’m showing you these projects not because I think they’re for everyone. Most of the things my husband makes require tools and woodworking skills. These posts are really about thinking in a more creative way when it comes to reusing items you already have. When you get ready to buy something new, think for a moment about whether or not you already have something that could be re-purposed in a creative new way.

I’ve talked before about reuse being even better than recycling. Recycling is certainly better than throwing something in the trash, but recycling does require energy to process. If you can find a way to reuse an item, it’s possible to do that with less energy output than recycling.

Fortunately for us, my husband enjoys woodworking and is also very creative. He consistently finds ways to reuse wood scraps and left over items from projects in our home. I thought I’d devote this blog post to a few of those things in our house. Today, I’m starting with our girls’ room.

When we bought this house in 2004 there was an icky room off of the laundry room, next to the garage. It had a stained, gray concrete floor, really dark wood paneling — generally dingy and grimy. After our girls came along and we were desperate to get some of their toys out of our living room, we decided to fix up the icky room. We painted the paneling and all the trim and my husband installed bamboo flooring. In the end, the room turned out like this:

As the girls have gotten older, we started having a problem with their shoes ending up all over the place. We finally worked out a system to get them to take their shoes up to their room each night, but there wasn’t really anywhere to put them. After a week or so of looking at the “shoe pile” in their room, my husband came up with the idea for this shoe rack. He made it out of left over bamboo flooring strips from the playroom and extra plywood he had from a train table he’d made them. I’m happy to report that the shoe rack works beautifully. They love to put their shoes away now.

Like most 4 year olds, our girls like to look at books. Books have become especially useful in the mornings when they awake at 5:00 a.m. and we’re not quite ready to get up yet. We’ve told them that if they wake up before 6:00, they may read quietly until we come to get them.

We had a large bin of books in their closet, but the books never seemed to end up back in there. I saw a bookshelf similar to the one below in a Pottery Barn catalog and showed it to my husband. He gathered some scrap wood together and came up with this. The girls love it.

Years ago a friend of mine decided she no longer wanted the wooden shutters on her house. My husband was happy to have them because he knew he’d be able to use the wood for something. He was in the process of building a storage cabinet for me and I asked him to use a pair of the shutters for the doors. We’ve since put the cabinet in the girls’ room to store some of their baby items and other mementos.

I realize that not everyone is a woodworker and that some of these projects would be very difficult to make by someone who is not. What I hope this post is more about, though, is thinking in creative ways. How can something be reused? What’s another way to re-purpose something you already have?

Stay tuned for more projects from around my house. I’d love to know what creative things you all have done.