More quick fixes

Well, here I am again, updating the blog on a Monday after a busy weekend. After being away in Virginia last Sunday, we spent Friday in Hopewell having a delayed Mother's Day celebration with my mom, this time tidying up the patio area in the back yard. We topped that off with back-to-back dance gigs on Saturday and Sunday, each at least an hour long and at least 45 minutes away, and the latter of the two in blazing noonday sun and 90-degree heat. I'd originally planned to come home and write the blog entry after that, but all I had the energy to do was drink a quart of water and spend the rest of the afternoon playing puzzle games. 

With all this going on, we didn't have time to tackle any big projects, so instead I'm writing about three small ones we've done over the past few months. These are all the sort of quick fixes that are a mainstay of our ecofrugal lifestyle: solving problems by substituting a bit of time and creativity for new, store-bought items.

Quick Fix #1: Free wall art

Our house is a...well, I don't know what style it is, exactly. It was built around 1970, so it has neither the charm of an old-fashioned Cape Cod or bungalow nor the practicality of a modern open-concept home. Instead, it has a single narrow hallway connecting the office at one end to the bathroom at the other, with entrances leading off it into the living room, bedroom, hall closet, and kitchen. It's a pretty drab space, and until this year, we hadn't done much of anything to it. We'd hung one piece of art—actually, six small nature sketches in one long frame—but since they were all in black and white, it didn't do much to liven up the area.

But the thing that bothered me most about the hallway was the two small, rectangular bumps on the side wall. One, located about at my eye level, is the thermostat, and the other, higher up the wall (just barely visible in the photo) is our doorbell. They don't even line up neatly with each other, but since they're both wired into the wall, there's no way to move them. They're just two randomly placed horizontal rectangles sticking out of the wall like warts.

So, last year, I came up with an idea to make those two oddly placed rectangles look intentional by surrounding them with a bunch of other rectangles: an array of small art pieces hung horizontally on the wall. To this end, we picked up a set of four small picture frames (roughly 6" by 8") for 50 cents each at a thrift shop. The problem then was what to put in them. We had only one piece of art the right size, a tiny abstract oil painting done by one of our niblings as a grade-school project. Should we try to thrift some artwork to fit the other frames? Should Brian draw some pictures to fill them? Or should we perhaps make enlarged prints of some family photos?

We continued dilly-dallying until last March, when Brian had a brainwave: If all we wanted was to make those awkward rectangles on the wall look intentional, it didn't matter what was in the frames. He hung the two pieces of horizontal art we had—the little abstract oil painting and a colorful David Goodsell painting of a virus that he got as a retirement present at work—and then simply filled up the rest of the frames with sheets of origami paper in coordinating colors. They're just blocks of solid color, but seen as part of a group, they look intentional. And we can always swap them out later if we find some other art we like better.

Quick Fix #2: A hands-free phone stand

I like to do the Wordle and other New York Times puzzles on my phone each morning while I eat my breakfast. The problem is, using one hand to eat and one to type leaves none free to hold the phone. I've tried propping it up against something, but it isn't very stable that way and tends to topple down with any stray movement. 

When we went to IKEA last March to pick up a new set of window shades, Brian spotted a little phone stand that he thought could solve this problem. The design was quite elegant: just a small slab of bamboo with a slot cut into it to hold the phone at the right angle. It was compact enough that it wouldn't be in the way on the kitchen table, and the price tag was a mere $5. But then he thought, why spend even $5 on something he could probably make himself for free?

He cut a scrap of plywood to approximately the same size as the IKEA stand, then set about gouging a slot in it with his Dremel tool. It wasn't set up to make angled cuts, so he had to place a triangular block of wood on top of the plywood scrap and use that to line up the cut. This awkward arrangement made it difficult to control the tool, and he ended up making the slot too big and having to nail a little shim to the inside. The finished piece isn't exactly elegant, but it serves its purpose: allowing me to eat my toast and solve the Wordle at the same time.  

Quick Fix #3: Not-so-visible mending

One of my most successful visible mending projects to date was the rainbow of stitches I added to my lightweight blue jeans last year to cover up the wear along the thigh inseam. I later added a similar row of stitches along the inseam of the other leg and later, as the worn areas spread, expanded both rows by adding a row of darker red stitches to the end. But last time I washed the jeans, I discovered a new threadbare patch farther in on the thigh. I've repaired holes like this before by adding colorful patches, but I didn't want to do that here because I feared it would clash with the colorful stitching I'd already added. How could I patch the hole in a way that wouldn't distract from my rainbow repair?

To solve this problem, I adapted a method I read about on the Wonderfil blog. I patched the jeans not on the outside, but on the inside, using a small fabric scrap a little bigger than the threadbare area. Then, to reinforce the patch, I put in several rows of stitches through both layers of fabric (the denim of the jeans and the patch underneath), running all the way across the hole. Not being proficient with a sewing machine, I couldn't do as thorough a job of this as the Wonderfil blogger did, but I ran multiple rows of stitches across the patch horizontally, then multiple rows vertically. When I was done, I trimmed away all the excess fabric from the patch, leaving a piece just big enough to cover the hole.

The finished repair is far from perfect. My hand-stitching is nowhere near as neat or precise as stitches put in by machine, and the navy thread I used isn't an exact match for the fabric of the jeans. But it should keep the hole from expanding, and it blends in well enough that a casual observer probably wouldn't spot it. And even if someone happens to notice the repair, it blends into the background well enough to let my rainbow stitching stand out as the real star of the show.