Using What You Find

Now I know there are those who choose to live of the grid and do it in style with hardly a ripple in the change from on grid to off, but those of use who are not loaded down with the amount of money needed to do it that way must resort to alternatives. What I mean is we had to find ways to do things simply and with as little money as possible. In my opinion society is continually trying to get us to conform and all do things exactly the same. When you get out of that mode of thinking it is amazing what you can come up with. Our goal is to live as simply and inexpensively as possible while still having the creature comforts we love. One thing we don't want is monthly bills so we refused to take out a mortgage to build our house.

This isn't a bad thing as it can be fun and as far as I'm concerned much more rewarding. For instance after checking out the prices of traditional kitchen cabinets we decided we really didn't have 5 to 10 thousand dollars to spend on them. Wow!! Kitchens can be expensive! So we went the non-traditional route by using products we could find cheaply and reasonably. I have to say I was very very pleased with the result. Mountain Man is, in my humble opinion, an artist. While the inside of the cabinets is regular melamine (you know that white stuff you probably have inside yours) the outside is very rustic. We took rough sawn boards purchase from a local supply store, dried and sanded them and built the doors etc out of them. These rough boards are normally used as wind break material for corrals etc. around here and I doubt any of the locals would think to use them for much else but look at them now! After being covered with a few coats of varathane they are perfect.

See those little brown doors on the bottom right? They pull out about 1.5 ft and are my spice drawers.

But what to do for the door pulls and handles? If you have read any of my posts on visitors around our homestead you might guess what we did. Many of our woodland neighbors have antlers they shed every year and we were lucky enough to have a supply on hand.

We still have a few sheds and are continually finding more. I keep saying we should maybe make a more polished door pull and sell it but Mountain Man thinks he will use them for other things. Maybe a coffee table?  Hmmm.....

A big thank you to Frugally Sustainable for featuring my blog again this week! Yeah!