for the past few days i’ve been staggering around and dancing nimbly ‘cross the forgotten gifts, the mountains of tissue paper , the endless repetitions of santa and snowmen and candy canes splayed kaleidoscopically across millions of square feet of wrapping paper, and the bottles and cans. let’s not forget the bottles and cans that saw us through stress and angst - filled christmas dinners, and blurred the formless post-christmas days into one!
what is one to do with this stuff? the easy solution is to bag it and box it and shove it into the blue boxes in the garage. but is there a creative use for it that would honour the “reuse” component of the recycling triad?
well, if you were these two stunners from the thirties, you could weld together all the tins you’ve finished off and make yourself a sweet set of lawn furniture.
the trouble with this solution is that i can’t help thinking that on a hot day, the seat of the chairs would fry your nether regions! ah, but then like the ladies in the picture, you could cool off with another can of beer. the eternal circle!! oh dear, but then there’s the issue that now “tins” are made of aluminum and so wouldn’t support the weight of your average barbie or ken doll. oh well, forget that idea.
there has to be something we can do.
now here’s a boy who had the right idea, but somewhere along the road lost his focus and became a little too possessive . . . granted, he did more than his fair share in propping up the flagging beer industry, but sadly he did not add to the aesthetic landscape, leaving instead a vision of excess.
happily, here in peterpatch we have a reasonably efficient recycling system that takes away many of the items that my parent’s generation would have shipped off to the dump. it’s astonishing to think that every bottle and every can made for a very, very long time ended up buried in great heaps of garbage. but, that was all that was known at that time.
a little searching has revealed that not all of the bottles and cans did in fact end up at the dump. some creative and thirsty souls saw promise in the heaps of glass and metal and instead of seeing rubbish, they saw building materials!
from legends of america comes this story of a man who put bottles to good use by building a home out of them:
“In 1906, in the old ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada a saloon owner named Tom Kelly, built a house out of bottles because lumber was scarce at the time. Reportedly he used some 50,000 beer, whiskey, soda and medicine bottles to build the structure which still stands today. Mr. Kelley was 76 years old when he built the house and it took him almost six months to complete.”
Next to the bottle house is a "garden" of sculptures made of broken glass including miniature houses, bottle ropes, and a whole bunch more glass junk, er... treasures.”
the rhyolite bottle house.
here are the boys preparing some building materials for the new house . . .
photographer julie quinn has done a stellar job of recording the details of the kaleva bottle house located in kaleva, michigan. what i find intriguing about this house is that at a glance it could pass for any one of tens of thousands of “war” houses, and yet stepping closer, one sees the true nature of the building.
not necessarily closer to home, but certainly on the canadian side of the border lies this home in prince edward island.
the beer can house offers one solution as to what to do with the post christmas cylinders.
here’s a page devoted to doc hope’s bottle house . . .
and here’s a page devoted to other bottle house’s.
finally, here’s a brand new home in bolivia that has solved some of that countries’ problems with recycling.
if nothing else, the preparation of the building materials could be a ton of fun . . . !
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