Repurposing or recycling stuff at your home is both a question of creativity and being budget-friendly. Most of us are not really used to doing that. The minute you and I need something, we just go out and buy it. But after watching some videos of frugal people on a show called “Ultimate cheapskates,” I kind of felt a little guilty. You see, these people had a completely different mindset from mine. For them, every day, they needed to win a battle against the forces that make us go out and buy stuff, you know…Marketing?
They tried to save money on absolutely everything. Now, I must admit that most of their methods were a bit too overboard for me. Like there was this girl that would go find her food outside dumpsters of restaurants, but there was something they all shared that kind of started winning me over. They all didn’t feel any pressure whatsoever to do what everyone else did.
Their homes reflected that lifestyle. They did not have anything fancy, but they were not bad at all. They would get most of the stuff for their houses from thrift stores and even given out to them. Actually, the more stuff they had gotten for free, the more they bragged about it. It was like a status symbol for them. The fact that you could get all that stuff for free baffled me.
Now, there were others that went to more extreme lengths, but in the end, they all managed to save a good amount of money. I remember when I was a kid, I used to do a lot of recycling. I didn’t do it for money reasons…well, now that I think of it, I think I did. But I also did it because I wanted to feel that I was doing something positive for the planet. My recycling ventures gave me a few dollars here and there, and gave me a new sense of purpose.
We also did the whole recycling/repurposing thing at home. We had a lot of glass jars that had served their original purpose already. My mother would wash them and used them to store many things from the kitchen and my father would also have them for storing anything from coins, screws, to pretty much anything that could get lost easily.
Recently, I saw something I had never seen before. I saw this video of how you can transform a tree skirt into a Holiday skirt you can wear. The idea did make a little sense, so I decided to watch the whole video. After I did, I asked my mother if the project could be done easily, and she said it could. Take a look for yourself and see how you can transform this object that usually gets forgotten after Christmas.