We’ve had an email from Amy, asking:

I have a large kiddie pool with a crack in the bottom that is not repairable. How can I recycle this?

She doesn’t say whether it’s an inflatable one (which are the most common type in the UK) or a more solid one - the “crack” suggests the latter - so feel free to make suggestions for either.

(We’ve covered smaller inflatables before and in a similar water-holding-thing-no-longer-holding-water, we covered fish tanks last week.)

(Photo by ssdg4773)

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As I mentioned yesterday, and alluded to the other week when asking about how to make a recycling bin thing, John and I have decided to tidy up our garden. “Garden” is quite a grand word for it because it’s really just a small yard that we’ve tried growing things in - but been unsuccessful because it’s north-facing in a not exactly warm or sheltered part of the country.

Over the years, I’ve tried growing all sorts of bits of veg in the not even 2m by 3m soily bit but not had much success because of the north-facing-ness, the resulting slugs of doom and our horrible clay-y soil which even repeated emptyings of the compost bin hasn’t really helped. I’m going to keep growing shrubs and anything else I can keep alive in pots but we’ve decided to “pave” it over so we can use the area in different ways (more space for drying clothes, entertaining friends and having space to do large scale, messy craft/building projects) - at the moment it’s a good-for-little muddy mess.

For obvious reasons, we’re reluctant to use newly cut stone for the job and have been on the lookout for patio flags that other people are replacing - but I’m wondering if anyone has any fun suggestions for us to use instead.

We’ve got some flat-tish pieces of york stone that we salvaged a few of years ago (they’ve actually been used as edging on the soil bed - shown in the picture the day we put it in) which we can use as crazy paving, but we don’t think we’ve got enough for the full job. So any suggestions of things we can use to pad the paving out a bit? Or put between the cracks?

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We’ve had an email from Valerie:

Recently, the uneven brick front steps to my house were knocked out in order to put in a sidewalk. Now I have single bricks, pieces of bricks, chips of bricks, and sections/blocks of several bricks mortared together. Almost all of the bricks still have mortar on them. Can anyone suggest a practical use for these?

We salvaged some bricks when a friend removed a 1970s style brick fireplace recently* and plan to use them to make a small (two-brick high) wall to hold back some shrubs off our path - the shrubs will hang over the wall so it doesn’t really matter what the bricks look like. We also have a random old brick on top of our compost bin to stop the lid blowing away. I hear that they’re also useful to put at the bottom of garden tubs - to stop them being as easily stolen/blown over.

But they’re mostly just ideas for full bricks? What about bits of bricks and chips?

* “recently” is an utter lie. It was about two years ago and they’ve been sat in our garden since then. We’re in a tidying the garden phase at the moment - hence the recycling bin thing I wanted ideas for the other week - though so maybe they’ll get used soon…

(Photo by jazza)

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On the “how can I make a bookshelf out of recycled stuff” post a couple of weeks ago, one of our lovely regular readers Alice suggested we should do more posts that way around - how can you do/make something out by recycling or reusing old junk.

I’ve added the idea to our suggestions request page but haven’t had any emails about it just yet, so am posting one from/for me instead.

We’re lucky that we have pretty decent doorstep recycling in Leeds - we’ve got a green wheelie bin for plastic (1 and 4), paper, cardboard, tins/cans etc - but it doesn’t include glass or tetrapak.

Our nearest bottle bank is frustratingly a drive away (why there isn’t one on our low-car-ownership estate is beyond me) so we usually collect up a fair stash and combine it with another trip in that direction. But this means we more often than not have a large amount of glass jars and bottles in our tiny front garden - which is both untidy and a potential safety hazard. The tetrapak stuff is safer but the collection spot even further away so we go there even less.

We need a way to keep this stuff out of the way - and dry: we had a set of plastic drawers out there at one point but they just filled with manky water every time it rained (well, fresh water than quickly turned manky).

So we need a recycling bin/shed thing to hold this stuff in and I’d much rather make one than buy anything. It can’t be too big because we’ve not got that much room and it needs to be reasonably easy to empty too.

Aside from looking out for an old bin (which are few and far between now since everyone’s had council wheelie ones for ages), any suggestions for things to make it from? I’m not particularly handy but willing to give things a go. Any tips on how to keep it from filling with rain or with ever curious cats?

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We’ve had another meta suggestion - this time from Kate:

How can I recycle a black plastic dustbin?

It’s true you shouldn’t bin a bin!

It is true! We’ve actually got two old bins in our garden - one pre-dating my move here that’s filled with soil and has herbs and ivy growing out of it (the latter pretty much hides the fact it’s a bin) while the other one (our pre-wheelie bin bin) is used for compost. It’s not as good as our proper compost bin - because there is no easy way to get the soil out again - but I consider it a long term overflow thing, to stop the other compost bin being filled up with things that take ages to rot. Before that, when we actually did DIY stuff on the house, it was used to hold bags of sand and cement because it was reasonably water tight.

Any more suggestions?

(Photo by dean)

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