Are you really throwing that thing away? It´s beautiful.

Old drawer becomes keepsake box

„Are you really throwing that thing away? It´s beautiful.”
is a sentence that rolls off my tongue quite often.
They often see an old thing that no longer has a purpose. For them, that is. And I, on the other hand, tend to see further, past the thing itself, to all the things it COULD be.

Take a cardboard box for example, it can be a box to pack things in and ship it. Or close it up, turn it around and it´s a coffee table in your first appartement, until you have the cash to buy a “proper “one.
Give that same box to a kid and it will become a fort, a rocket or a castle. Cut it into flat parts and you have a new raw material to make many things out of, with some glue and imagination.
That same thing, the box, has many things it CAN be and that is the basis of my fascination with things.
They are currently one thing, with one function, and then they get discarded in the trash, or forgotten somewhere under the motto “oh that old thing, we don´t use that anymore”.

I like saving old things that have had a life, a story and turn them into something else, something that has a purpose again, but possibly not the same purpose they had before.

As an example, a few years back I helped a friend clean out an old house in Antwerp, Belgium. The house and much of the furniture was close to 100 years old.
For the new occupants, almost everything was unwanted and was going to go into a huge container to be dumped.
When we got to a cabinet that was broken but had beautiful hand carved drawers and a purple stained glass door I stopped the party and asked if I could save those pieces and kidnap them home.
3 of those elements became part of a new cabinet that still stands in my house today and the 4th piece i turned into a keepsake box for a friend of mine.

The original drawer, slightly broken, close to a 100 years old but very pretty to me.

That last piece was one of those drawers, old: yes, broken:yes but not useless.
I took all the good pieces and made them into a box.
The materials, hardware and finish are still good after 100 years and will continue to do so, while again serving as a functional piece for someone else.
The thing, that someone made, sold, someone else used for many years, has now become a new thing, that someone made, gave away and someone else will use for many years.

All the good pieces cut to size and glued up in keepsake-box-form.

The first step is seeing the object you want, having the desire for something.
The second is often to simply go out and buy it.

A big part of what I try to do online is to convince people to try and make the things they want. It´s for everyone, from a super handyman with a full workshop, to a 10 year old who has never made a single thing. It´s good for the environment because you are recycling, its imaginative and gets your brain working on the puzzle of how to make it, but most of all, the satisfaction of making your own things is irreplaceable. Even if it is cardboard, hot glue and tape, my 4y old son and I have made toys, crappy, ugly toys, in 10 minutes from those 3 items that he still uses a year later, because they are unique and he made it himself.

The inside of the finished box.

That feeling, accomplishment, is one of life´s greatest motivators and sources of happiness.
I truly hope that more people can achieve that feeling and everything that comes with it.