REUSE, REDUCE. RECYCLE

We’re all used to hearing this saying, now more than ever! As we stay at home with little resources, we have to be more creative.  I’ve been busy designing my Potager Garden (kitchen garden to you and I!) with things I’ve found around the garden and recycling all our plastic and other 'scrap' (I said scrap!) to fill my new raised beds and planters. I’ll share more of that another time.

One of my favourite 'reuse, reduce, recycle' projects is the kitchen in our shop. It was on its way to the tip having recently been removed from a local house renovation. Up until then, we made the space useable as retail space, but I knew that I wanted to make it look like a real kitchen! As this was our shop and not our home, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to achieve the look of the Neptune kitchen I coveted and had a picture of on the wall!!

Image Neptune (my most favourite 'real' shop!)

Once we’d collected it and worked out which units would fit in our space, we removed all the handles and replaced them with brass half moon handles I bought from Ebay. Jonathan painted the doors and drawers in really dark Sailors Blue by Autentico. Our biggest expense was a deep solid wood worktop from a local timber merchant. My tip for making a kitchen look expensive is spend money on deep quality worktops, it makes all difference.


The kitchen even came with a Butlers sink. I had a tap made out of copper pipe with brass garden taps, a look I knew my husband wouldn't go for in our own home! Simple metro tiles from Topps Tiles completed the look.


The whole kitchen renovation cost £350!

Our Greenhouse at home was on Facebook, ‘FREE to anyone who could collect’! It was an original Crittall Greenhouse, so I knew it would be well built, despite it's sorry state. I said we would have it immediately, much to my husbands horror! He resisted collecting it for quite a while, mainly because we hadn’t cleared the site or built the fence between us and our neighbour! I had more images and a vision of how I wanted it to look. “Why can’t you be normal” he sighed, as I showed him unachievable images on Pinterest of a black greenhouse and one with a stupendous herringbone floor!


The only things we had to buy was matt Black paint (we already had a spray gun!), some secondhand replacement glass and a liner for the floor. I’ve written a full blog post on the full story, but the Greenhouse cost around £300 in total! A new one like this would be £1,000's!


So it’s amazing what you can do to reuse, reduce and recycle things that would otherwise end up in landfill! I appreciate I have a long suffering husband who is very handy, but I do have a go myself! My Potager Garden will be my biggest undertaking! So if I can have a go, anyone can! I think a lot of people think that recycling furniture might look cheap, but when the previous owner of our kitchen came into the shop and asked if I’d had a Neptune kitchen fitted, I couldn’t have been happier!

As we've just been told lockdown will be at least another three weeks and we head into a 'weekend', what projects will you be up to?


Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published