The $8 Bike Rack - How to Secure Your Bicycle on the Cheap

Challenge: find a secure way to lock up our bikes on the cheap.  Since Courtney and I moved into the smallest house ever, we can no longer keep our bikes inside.  We think they make a pretty tempting treat just hanging out in plain view, so we decided to invest in a rack.  Unfortunately, a good rack is very expensive, and a cheap rack is not worth the price tag unless you have additional layers of security (e.g. bikes are already inside a garage).  So we decided to hit up our local go to "DIY on the cheap" shop, Bring Recycling.  After some deliberation and a lot of poking around, here is what we came up  with:

1 staircase handrail
2 concrete masonry units
1 mess of bailing wire

Total price tag: $4

After a quick trip to the local hardware store, we also picked up a bag of Quikrete, $4.  I think you can see where I am going with this.  We combined these simple ingredients in a pan coated with butter, put it in our easy bake oven for 15 minutes, and this is what came out:

Seriously, though, it was almost that easy.  As you can see, we used some cardboard boxes left over from the move to create little forms around the CMUs, put the handrail in the CMU and stuffed the bailing wire in around it (so you can't just take a sledge to it), poured in the Quikrete and let it set.  The result is heavy as heck and can't be defeated without some tools and some time (but even the best racks can be defeated with the right tools and some time). 

So there you have it, instant bike rack, $8 and about 2 hours total labor (plus 24 hour cure time).  It is not the most secure solution ever, but it will deter the average thief pretty effectively.

To Dream of Less Stuff

Stuff, it sometimes seems, is who we are.  We produce it and measure our worth in its production.  We buy and sell it and measure our success in its exchange.  We own it, use it and replace it, and measure our happiness in its possession and acquisition.  We often confuse obtaining more stuff with bettering ourselves, so new stuff becomes equated with self-improvement.
And yet, if all that is true, we seem to be ignoring some important parts of ourselves.  What does it say, for example, that so much of our stuff is disposable?  Having no longevity, no staying power, sacrificing quality for convenience.

What does it say that we have so much stuff built for one and only one purpose?  Our kitchens and closets are cluttered with highly specialized gadgets, many of which are used only once a month, or even once a year. I don't doubt the convenience of a food processor, but do we need a blender, an immersion blender, a food processor, a juicer, a mortar and pestle, a mandolin, spice grinder, coffee grinder, and a Magic Bullet?  Every house has an oven, yet we feel the need to augment this with a toaster oven, microwave, bread maker, crock pot, and pressure cooker.  Any one of these items is perfectly reasonable, but is it reasonable to have all of them?

What does it say about us that we always want everything to be brand new?  As soon as something develops its first nick or mar, it begins to bother us, to weigh heavily on our subconscious as if the mar were a blemish on our very souls.  Nothing we own is allowed to have any history, any meaning beyond itself.  Nothing is allowed the taint of a previous owner, nor any significance beyond its immediate purpose.

In the last month, I have come to realize that it is exceedingly rare that we actually need new stuff.  When we challenge our selves just a little, we find that we can use things which are marred, we can fix things which are broken, we can buy things which have been owned by a stranger before us, and we can even make smoothies and pesto without a Magic Bullet.  Most amazing of all, when we challenge ourselves, we find that sometimes, we can even do without.

Just as I have been dreaming of less for so many other things, I have been dreaming of less stuff.  Less clutter, less trash, less hassle, less mess.  I have been dreaming of things which serve many purposes, eliminating the need for other stuff.

I have been dreaming of buying everything used which can be bought used.  I dream not just of less stuff in my home, but in the human world as a whole, and second hand goods eliminate the need for more new stuff.  In a sense, an item can be divided by the number of people who have owned it, so that I own 1/5 of a couch, 1/4 of a dining set, 1/3 of a coffee table, 1/6 of an armchair.

I have been dreaming, longingly, of storage spaces that are clearly organized, free of clutter, full without being stuffed.  I dream of all my spaces being clear of stuff, the surfaces in my house being almost empty when not in use.  I dream of having one of everything I need and none of anything I don't.

I dream of a life which is occupied by a small amount of highly useful, durable, beautiful stuff that I love to use, to look at, to care for.  I dream of meeting my every need with as little material as possible, and not coveting that which I do not need.  I dream of a home in which all of my stuff improves my quality of life, and anything which does not is banished forever from my home.

Courtney and I have been moving actively toward this dream for some time now, and after many purges of stuff followed by periods of buying nothing new, we have achieved a level of stuff which is well bellow average, but there is much work left to be done before we are living the dream that we are dreaming.  The journey, so far at least, has been liberating and joyous, and the less we use to meet our needs (both real and invented) the better we feel about our stuff.

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• You: The Minimalist: The Food Processor: A Virtuoso One-Man Band (nytimes.com)

Waste Not

Image via Wikipedia

Re-posted from the iPinion Syndicate

After writing about buying second hand goods, I got a few comments about giving to thrift stores, selling to stores like Crossroads, and having a garage sale to get rid of stuff instead of just throwing it away.  After all, as I am sure you have heard many times by now, there is no ‘away.’  Or rather, ‘away’ is the ocean, landfills and incinerators.


‘Away’ is not so far away as you would like, and bits of what you throw away find their way back to you (like the mercury in seafood).  The bits that don’t find their way back still might be affecting you in some other manner: by disrupting a food source, permanently damaging some piece of land, or being incinerated and mucking up your air.


There is a lot of waste in our society.  For the identifiable past of ‘western civilization,’ we have always thought of things in terms of raw materials, useful products, and waste to be dealt with.  But only in the past century and a half has the amount of waste been such a huge and universal problem.  Today, we generate so much waste that even though we burn and bury the majority of it, it is clogging our streams, rivers, ports and even making a significant impact on every sea and ocean on the planet.  If this were intentional, it would be quite an accomplishment.  Unfortunately, it is a destructive and unintentional consequence of simply not paying enough attention to how much waste we generate and how we deal with it.


Now for the bad news: there is very little that you can do about it.  At least by yourself, right now.  You can recycle, and that is great.  It really helps.  Unfortunately, most things are not easily recyclable, and no municipality in this country has a 100% recycling rate for the things that are.

Image via Wikipedia

You can reuse stuff instead of throwing it away.  You can (as mentioned above) sell or give old stuff away and buy other stuff second hand.  This keeps stuff out of land fills and incinerator, and also reduces the need for manufacturing, packaging and shipping of more new stuff.  But some things are never going to be available second hand, like food and cleaning products; nor should they be.


Finally, you can reduce the amount of stuff you buy.  Maybe.  Depending on the stuff.  And you can consciously choose to buy stuff with less packaging.  Sometimes.  When there is an option.  The fact is, the current paradigm embraces the old ‘raw materials, stuff, waste’ mind set wholeheartedly, and almost everything comes packaged in layers and layers of waste.  And all that is not even the worst part, not by half.


The worst part is that before the stuff even got to the store, massive amounts of water and materials were turned into waste in the manufacturing process, and you as an individual right now have absolutely no power over that at all.  Except...


 There is one more thing that you can do that begins with ‘r,’ though it isn’t part of the traditional waste hierarchy: research.  You can try to find out about the stuff you are buying, how it is produced, and vote with your dollars.  So the good news is that we as the consumers (not individuals), over time (not right now), can try as often as possible to choose the less wasteful option, and that will make a difference.  Because the more dollars that flow to low waste products, the more pressure there will be for a paradigm shift, from ‘materials, stuff, waste,’ to ‘materials, stuff, materials, stuff, materials...’  There is a growing field called industrial ecology that is preparing the new paradigm, and if we all push together, we can get this boulder rolling in their direction.

Green Pet Care

Since we have adopted Cleo, we have been confronted with a hundred new choices a day. What food do we buy? Wet, dry or mix? How many toys does she need (a: a lot)? what kind? How do we train her? Crate or no? There is so much that has to be done right away, so many decisions, that how green the choices are doesn't even enter the equation at first.

Truth be told, keeping pets is not really a green practice, in the strictest sense, because you need to feed them and provide them with entertainment, all of which usually takes up energy. One of the main criteria for making decisions for you pets, however, is a big part of going green: health. All green programs contain a substantial portion about the health of people, and pets are people too.

When you choose food for your animals, you want what is good for them, and unfortunately that can be very hard to determine. Every source of information seems to conflict, and most of the advice you get is downright bad. We trusted a pet store clerk who swore by one brand of dog food, and foolishly did not read the ingredients before leaving the store. When we got home and double checked, the second ingredient was corn, followed by wheat.

Although dogs are omnivorous by nature, a much larger portion of their diet is naturally meat, so if some kind of animal protein is not the first ingredient the food is not good. After that protein (usually chicken meal) fruits, vegetables and some grains are okay, but many dogs have difficulty digesting wheat and corn, so grains should be rice, barley, or some other alternative grain. Soy protein is also a big red flag, as soy is no part of a dogs natural diet, and usually it is used instead of some other meat protein.

Toys are a big issue too. We heard (unverified) that the squeaky part of squeak toys can come out if the dog destroys the toy, and they can choke on it (plus squeak toys are annoying). But trying to find a dog toy that doesn't squeak is like trying to find bread that doesn't contain wheat (possible, as anyone who knows us knows, but hard).

Then we came across someone on the web who wrote about making toys from random junk in your house (I think Courtney read that at the Bark). Instead of throwing away old socks, knot them up turn them into chew toys. If you have old water bottles you can stuff them in those old sock (without the cap) as a pit stop before recycling. Of course you have to make sure that you aren't giving your dog something toxic, or something that will break into pieces that she can choke on, but this is just part of the creative process of turning trash into toys. The maker in me loves this idea. Although the person who posted these ideas was talking about saving money, it is also a green practice for all the reasons that I love the make movement.

It seems in general that the more you control what you give your dog, the healthier it will be (kind of obvious, once you state it). For that reason, we have been thinking about making our own food for the dog, a practice that seems crazy at first but makes more sense the more you think about it. Dogs have been with us for thousands of years, and prepackaged dog food has been around for less than a century. So for the thousands of years minus a hundred before that? We fed our dogs similarly to how we fed ourselves, and it worked out fine. We haven't committed yet, but if we do I will be sure to keep everyone updated.

Used = Green

My wife and I stumbled upon an amazing fact up in Oregon: It is saturated with beautiful antique quality furniture. When we moved up at the beginning of the summer, we didn't want to bring all of our old baggage with us. We got rid of as much as we possibly could, including most of our furniture.

In looking for new furniture, we found that what worked in LA did not necessarily work in Eugene. Craigslist had some decent stuff, but it was pretty bleak compared to SoCal. Then we wandered into a St. Vincent de Paul, which I didn't know was a thing before we moved. We were both amazed, the thrift stores in Eugene are all packed with beautiful furniture. Stuff that would go for thousands of dollars in vintage shops on Melrose Blvd. was more like $100 bucks there.

Then, because Craigslist had to redeem itself, we came across a promising post. I believe all it said was "modern sofa," or something to that effect, and when my wife called, he said he had "s0me more modern stuff." When we arrived, there was a garage full of mid century modern furniture which this guy had culled from all over the Pacific North West. He also knew everything about modern design, and knew the designer of most of the pieces that he was offering. We furnished most of our living room out of his garage. Here are a few of the pieces that we got:

Dining set by Paul McCobb

Sofa by Umanoff, end table by Keal

Don't know designer, if you have any ideas please post in comments

I would be lying if I said that I was thinking about this at the time, but in retrospect this is the most sustainable way we could have furnished our new place, and it is also an excellent example of how you can save money being green. In the past, I have furnished apartments with a bunch of nice looking but really low quality cookie cutter furniture from Ikea and Target, and most of it eventually ended up in the trash.

Cheap furniture is really disposable furniture. When particle board warps, chips, cracks or breaks, it cannot really be repaired, and once it starts down that path it is not long before it ends its life in the landfill. It is usually designed to be put together only once, as well. Pre-drilled holes in the particle board and cam locks made of weak metal ensure that if you disassemble your Ikea desk, it will lose most of its structural integrity when you put it back together.

In the long run, cheap furniture ends up costing you more money, because you have to replace it more frequently. But unless you are paying more in taxes than I make in a year, antique quality furniture is way too expensive, and there isn't really much of an in between.

One great way to get around this dilemma is to buy used furniture. You can tell if it is well made pretty easily: if it is still solid after years of use it will probably be good for many more. Also, solid wood is really easy to repair. With a very small investment in wood glue, a few clamps, and maybe a power drill, you can keep solid wood pieces alive for decades.

Buying used stuff is more sustainable in two ways: first it reduces demand for more new stuff, which means that there is less energy being consumed to produce that new stuff, and second it keeps old stuff out of the waste stream. But more than being green, when you buy used you can afford to get better quality stuff; beautiful, well designed stuff that you will love. And if you love it, you will take care of it: fix it when it breaks and find a good h0me for it when it no longer fits in your life.

Different cities have different channels for finding good used stuff. The thrift stores in Eugene, for example, are a great resource, where in LA they have been completely picked over by people who buy the good stuff, fix it up, and sell it for 10 times as much out of little boutique shops. But, in Los Angeles, the stuff available on Craigslist and at yard sales can be amazing. One way or another, people are always changing their surroundings, and high quality used furniture is available for those who seek it.

The Maker Movement - why it is green and why I love it

I don't know if the people who started the Maker Movement intended it to be a green movement, but whether intended or not, it has the potential to do all kinds of green good.

The fact of the matter is that we Americans buy too much junk. And I am not preaching at you here, I am not telling you that you personally are responsible for the over consumption problem, I am saying that too much of the stuff we buy ends up being junk.

So many of the products that we buy are poorly designed, or worse, designed to break. Whats more, when they break, you find that they are impossible to open up and repair. In fact, if you do open one up, your warranty instantly expires, and FBI agents break down your door and cart you off to be prosecuted for theft of intellectual property. Sort of.

Manufacturers have gotten used to the idea that they are selling you a closed system, and if anything ever goes wrong your only options are taking it back to the manufacturer or throwing it out to buy a new one. Planned obsolescence and designing for short product life span ensure that you will need to purchase a replacement widget soon, and the old widget will be useless for any purpose other than filling land.

So what can we possibly do in the face of such an entrenched system? Is there no way out? Well the people at Make Magazine may not have all the answers, but they have a great philosophy for getting more out of your junk, and evaluating whether or not your next purchase is going to be junk.

Make is a Magazine about how to be a modern day tinkerer, how to get more out of those widgets we buy with our hard earned money, and how to turn our landfill fodder into a fun Sunday project. With the purchase of a few basic tools (that should last you the rest of your life), we can conquer our waste stream, open up those busted products to repair them, re purpose them, or possibly even improve them.

Endowing garbage with new value, reusing and re purposing things instead of buying new junk, that is as green as it gets. Also, it's FUN! What former boyscout, amateur engineer, or generally interested person doesn't LOVE the idea of cracking stuff open and messing with the functional parts?

On the purchasing new stuff side, Mr. Jalopy (yes, like an old car) has penned the Maker's Bill of Rights, a simple list of how a product should be presented. In a forum at the UCLA book fair this past spring, he asked the audience: if you can't open something up and tinker with it, do you really own it? Or are you just renting it from the manufacturer? With that in mind, the Maker's bill of rights provides a simple list of rules for products that a Maker will approve of. Some of them are neat little memorable sayings that hold an entire philosophy in a few words, such as the most quotable: "screws are better than glues."

I think that embracing the Maker's philosophy can improve the relationship that people have with their stuff and at the same time reduce unnecessary waste and consumption. I dare say, if more people took the initiative to understand how things work and how to work with them, the positive repercussions could be limitless.