Gardening With Repurpose

 

Amonges othere of his honeste thynges,
He made a gardyn, walled al with stoon;
So fair a gardyn woot I nowher noon.

"January's Garden"—Chaucer, A Merchant's Tale, 816-818

Although Chaucer's legacy lives on with T.S. Eliot's "April is the cruelest month," remodeled from the original "Whan that Aprill, with his showers soote," in Savannah Georgia we often have a true "midwinter Spring" the through virtually the whole winter. Thus, today, we thought it would be nice to present some lovely gardening ideas reclaimed from our workshop. 

A nice elegant elephant potholder. Image courtesy of Active Planet Travels

The majority of our materials, from antique heart pine flooring, to furnishings find their way into our hands because we choose to save them from the dumpster and the wrecking ball. So when we are asked to sustainably deconstruct or remodel a historic property, we often carry away more than beautiful historic boards. We end up with sinks and metals, toilets and bricks. 

Another use for a toilet bowl. Image courtesy of Active Planet Travels

Although we reuse many of these in our building or remodeling projects, or  even make them into furniture, some stay either in limbo, waiting for a new purpose, or some are too battered to reuse in a home. To prevent these odds and ends from ending up in the dumpster, adding to environmental waste and emissions, we've converted them into planters for a little urban garden. 

The result is that our stockpile has become instantly more pleasant to the eye, as January's garden, and also transforms our shop into an ad-hoc green space for the community. Repurposing with even an aesthetic purpose is what we love. I'm certain Eliot would rethink his Wasteland if he and Chaucer haunted by.  

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Drayton Tower Kitchen Countertops

A few years ago we were asked to make custom kitchen countertops for the apartments in Drayton Tower, on 102 E. Liberty Street. Guided by the stipulation that the countertops should cohere with the mid-century character of the building, we decided to fashion them out of bowling lanes reclaimed from a neglected bowling alley in north Jacksonville. We then cut varying sizes from the full-length (15 foot) lanes to fit appropriately the different spaces in kitchens of different apartment types, then finished each with beeswax and food-safe mineral oil. 

Though appropriating bowling lanes for use in the kitchen might seem strange, it coheres quite well with the history of the building itself. 

The twelve story tall tower, completed in 1951 and called Drayton Arms, originated as an apartment building proposed to accommodate veterans and lower income tenants. Though its modern design was quite appealing in its time, over the next two decades the building fell into disuse and disrepair as populations migrated into the suburbs. It sat for in this condition for nearly 40 years, until Drayton Arms was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, and shortly afterward was bought and renovations commenced. 

The newly christened Drayton Towers opened in 2013 and holds 99 studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments within the upper floors of the building. Before the opening, we assisted a variety of demolition and deconstruction work on the building itself, and, to finish the apartments, added these countertops. As the structure itself was built in 1951, we decided to use our bowling lanes—the ‘40s, ‘50s’ and ‘60s are considered the “golden age of bowling,” after which the game fell out of favor. Subsequently bowling alleys across the nation fell into a similar disuse and even closed, leaving the sturdy (imagine a wooden remain uncracked with 16 pound balls flung at it all day) and beautiful lanes exposed to deterioration or tossed into the dumpster. 

As our original stipulation required, these reclaimed and repurposed bowling lane countertops reflect the renovated Drayton Tower, both salvaged from probable destruction from a time slowly forgotten, and fashioned into a refined, functional and austere contemporary design.