Hitting the skids in Muskoka

Using recycled materials at the cottage is not just about saving the planet. Sometimes it is a case of saving some cash.

It started out innocently enough. I needed to build a workbench and was heading off to my local lumber merchant for supplies. But on the way, I met my wife for some grocery shopping and chanced upon a meeting of the Muskoka Sustainability Coalition.

The meeting was one of those good-hearted, Save-the-Earth get-togethers where people talk about big picture, global issues like there’s a way any of us could do anything about them. Climate change: bad. Plastic shopping bags: evil. Lindsay Lohan: sad. It was all pretty overwhelming. So I continued on with the day’s quest for wood.

But I got to thinking, maybe there was something to this Reduce, Reuse, Recycle thing. Maybe I could build my workbench out of something other than virgin lumber. But what?

I cruised around the back of the store and pulled up beside the dumpster. Not the garbage dumpster — that’s pretty nasty. This was the wood bin and it was crammed with the pallets that their merchandise comes strapped to. Huge, crudely constructed, eight-foot-long spruce monstrosities from deliveries of ladders; cripplingly heavy oak ones from shingle orders that were ugly but strong. And then I saw them: South American tile pallets made from what appeared to be mahogany and assembled with clean cuts and square corners. These things were furniture-grade! Houston, we have building materials.

I loaded the van with six or eight of these skids and was about to head inside for the plywood deck of the bench when I noticed that they throw away three-foot by six-foot panels of three-quarter-inch-thick, high-density fibreboard (HDF), too — it probably comes as a protector on lifts of laminate flooring. Four of these and my “shopping” was done. I’ve got nails and screws at home.

The workbench went together like I knew what I was doing. I laid the skids on their sides lengthwise and they were the perfect height and depth for the bench. Spaced about four feet apart, they gave enough support to the HDF top that it didn’t even sag. And when I was done with the construction adhesive and deck screws, I could pound on the thing all day and it was steady as a rock. My 12-foot-long workbench cost me nothing but gas across town and my dumpster-diving virginity. And so was born my addiction.

I’d bought a set of metal shelves several years ago and regretted it almost immediately. It looked really nice in the newspaper ad but the thing took a year and a half to assemble, was rickety beyond belief. The metal of the shelves was so thin that I crimped the upper one the first time I loaded it up — my monkey wrench nearly went right through it. Apparently you don’t get much for $29 on sale. The good ones cost at least $89 but that was out because I needed about six of them.

I now have six but they’re made out of hardwood skids, not pop can-grade steel metal. Sure they’re a little bulky but they’re solid as a rock and you could throw a small-block eight on the middle shelf and the structure wouldn’t budge. Project number two was a success. That’s where I got cocky.

The roof of my garage was notorious for leaking (note to Muskoka contractors: flat roofs and the 705 area don’t mix). I had wanted to put a peaked roof on it for years but the cost of trusses and shingles was problematic.

Enter “Engineered Building Slabs”. They didn’t even all have to be the same size — as long as I could get a solid row out of a particular width, nothing was ever too far out of whack. The assembly needed to be stronger than my other projects, but a garage sale took care of the cost of that — a five-gallon pail of six- and eight-inch carriage bolts for $8! After that it was just a case of the time involved. But as in any home renovation, your time is free, right?

Well, maybe. Getting enough skids took weeks. Assembling the roof took days. And weathering the chuckles from my friends continues to this day. But hey — my garage now has a sloped roof, rain runs off it, not into it, and no more trees died in the making of it all.

I’m not sure if I’m “green” or just Scottish.

Ian MacKenzie is a freelance writer and broadcaster who got this brilliant idea to move to the cottage.