Is there a word for when you’re window-shopping skips? I was skip-gazing (?) around the corner the other day and as well as having a mighty fine looking pallet in there (yoiiiiink), there were several old paint roller trays flung on top.

Compared to rollers, paint trays are super easy to clean (especially if you line them with a carrier bag first) so I don’t know why they were thrown out. There were a couple of emulsion ones and a couple of smaller gloss ones.

We’ve got plenty of trays for painting ourselves but I guess I could rinse them off and offer them on Freecycle or something.

As for reuses, in the past, I’ve used old roller trays as drip trays under seedlings (the deep part is more useful if you’re carrying them around, they have a tendency to wobble off the shelf bit – but that’s fine catching run off if it’s in one place). What else can be done with them?

So, as I’ve mentioned once or twice, we moved into our new house three weeks ago.

I do apologise for mentioning it a lot but it’s pretty much overwhelming my life at the moment – I’d lived in the last place for nearly a decade and hope to be here at least the same amount of time. It needs a lot of work doing to it – considerably more maintenance-type work than we’d thought (every floorboard creeks, every tap drips…) but also a lot to make it our own. It’s a lot of work but mostly very satisfying.

As we’re getting past the bulk of the “must do instantly” jobs, we’re starting to combine chores and fun tasks and one of the fun tasks is filling all the blank walls with pictures and other creations. I’m definitely going to use a lot of the frame ideas you wonder people suggested when I was asking about mirrors a few weeks ago but I also wondered how people have made the actual surface to paint on – what works well instead of actual canvas? I imagine other lighter cotton such as t-shirt jersey or bed linen might be too thin to hold the paint but would denim from old jeans work as a heavy textured alternative?

I’ve heard about the underside of hardboard being a good surface. What else?

The Eternal*Voyageur is back again, asking:

Any ideas on how to reuse children’s drawings ? My daughter brings a bunch of them from pre-school every day. I don’t have the heart to throw them away, and I can display only so many!

I feel the same way about anything we make/draw/paint too – and we’re nowhere near as precious as children :)

If they can’t be displayed but you’d like to keep them, how about making them into books? A hole punch (and maybe some of those reinforcer stickers), some pretty string and maybe some old cardboard decorated for covers would do for the most basic version. Keeping every picture is still going to leave you with a hefty pile but at least they’ll be easier to store – and easier to enjoy in the future.

Anyone else got other storage or reuse ideas?