Ingenuity > spending

A big part of living ecofrugally is finding ways to solve problems without spending, substituting a combination of work and imagination for money. Appropriately enough, this Labor Day weekend has given us three opportunities to fix problems using our own labor—a bit of physical and, even more important, a good dollop of mental.

Problem #1: The mismatched rain barrel hose

Our new rain barrel didn't come with a hose to drain off excess water. To fill this need, we picked up a cheap garden hose for $7 at Ocean State Job Lot. Brian screwed it on to the overflow valve at the top of the barrel, then stuck it through the garden fence behind the barrel to direct the flow away from the house. 

This was perfectly functional, but it didn't look great. Every time I opened the kitchen door to dump something in the compost bin, it really bugged me to see our nice, new terracotta-colored barrel marred by that incongruous piece of shiny green plastic sticking off the side. (I didn't get a photo of it, but here's a little picture I mocked up with Microsoft Paint to give you the general idea.)

The simple, spendy solution to this problem would have been to go to the home center and buy a new hose in a more unobtrusive black for $15 or so. But in less time than it would have taken us to drive there, I was able to fix the problem with less than a dollar's worth of black duct tape. I just started at the valve end and wrapped it diagonally around the hose until I got to the bottom.

Seen close up, this doesn't look perfect. But we don't spend that much time looking at it close up anyway. It was the view from a distance that bothered me, and that problem is now fixed with minimal cost and effort.

Problem #2: The off-color sandals

No, I don't mean that they were any way suggestive (unless you're into feet, I guess). It was their actual color that was off.

As I've noted many times on this blog, I have a lot of trouble finding shoes that fit my needs. I spent a good portion of this summer looking for a pair of off-white wedge sandals, and several pairs I ordered online either got returned because they didn't fit or, in one case, never arrived at all. So when my latest purchase, a cheap Chinese pair with adjustable hook-and-loop straps, actually felt comfortable the minute I put them on my feet, I knew I was going to keep them, no matter what.

But these shoes had one glaring flaw that hadn't been obvious in the listing. Since my feet are wide, I had to loosen the straps, leaving a portion of the hook-and-loop tape (the generic name for Velcro) visible. And while the uppers were a light beige color, the tape was white. Not off-white, but bright, optical white. The contrast between it and the shoes was very pronounced and very distracting.

A quick Google search led me to this blogger, who said she had successfully painted Velcro using an art tool called a Paintstik. I didn't have any of those, and a quick search suggested that they didn't really come in the off-white color I was looking for anyway, so I started hunting for other alternatives. First I tried tea, which I knew could be used as a fabric dye. (In All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown, one of the girls has to use it on her sister's dress after she spills iced tea on it.) Pressing a damp tea bag repeatedly over one of the hook-and-loop bits turned it a little darker, but it was a big hassle and not all that effective. I thought of trying shoe polish, but the brown shoe polish we had was significantly darker than the shoes, and too-dark tape would look just as bad as too-light.

Searching for a closer color match, I hit on the tube of concealer in my purse. And this turned out to be not only effective, but also extremely easy to apply. I just scrubbed it onto the hook-and-loop tape with an old toothbrush, and it sank right in with just a few seconds of work. The color isn't a perfect match for the sandals, but it's close enough now that you only notice the mismatch if you're staring straight at it. And when is anyone ever going to do that?

Problem #3: Making room for under-sink storage

Lately, we've taken to washing our cleaning rags separately so they don't transfer dirt or oil to the rest of our laundry. At first we put a little mini-hamper for them next to our main clothes hamper, but that system turned out not to be ideal. With the two baskets right next to each other, sometimes we'd absentmindedly toss a rag into the main bin, and occasionally small items like undies and socks accidentally ended up in the rag bin. 

So we decided it would make more sense to keep the rag bin in a separate location. The kitchen seemed like the logical spot, since we could toss rags in immediately after using them. Unfortunately, the only place we could reasonably put the bin was under the sink, and we already had two trash cans there—one for actual trash, and the other holding miscellaneous items like foil, parchment paper, sponges, and zip-top bags. In order to make room for the rag bin, we'd have to find another way to store all that other stuff.

We found some room for the smaller items in a drawer that was only partially filled with dishtowels. For the longer items, we figured the best option would be a cabinet-door organizer like this one. However, we couldn't find anything along those lines at either Target or Home Depot. So, rather than order one online and wait for it to arrive, Brian just measured the cabinet door, made a quick sketch, and disappeared into his workshop. 

When he emerged, he was holding a simple box made of unfinished scrap wood with some little tabs on the back that could be screwed to the cabinet door. We can always finish it later if we want it to look nicer, but for now, it does a perfectly good job of holding the foil, zip-top bags, and parchment paper. In fact, we have much easier access to them now than we did when they were shoved into a trash can with a bunch of other stuff on top. And we now have a spot for dirty rags under the sink, right next to the dispenser that holds our clean rags.

So there you have it: three problems solved with less than a dollar's worth of materials and less than an hour of labor. In every case, the solution is at least as good as something we could have purchased, and in the case of the sandals, it's clearly better. Given how little luck I'd had finding sandals all summer long, this is a problem I probably couldn't have solved at all by throwing money at it.