• Q: What do you with a drunken sailor?
• A: Shave his belly with a rusty razor.

• Q: What do you do with a old white toilet?
• A: I have no clue…

I’m trying my best to be as green as possible while remodeling my house. I have used as much salvage goods as possible. I’m on a first name basis with the guys at Construction Junction and try to be the Mayor of the recycling dumpster.

However, what do I do with an old toilet?

Yes, I can donate it for reuse but then I’m encouraging someone to use too much water every time they make sissy.  The toilet in question used 3.5 gallons per flush. That’s 2 gallons more then the federaly mandated standard. I’m not the math wiz (pun intended) but that’s a lot of water being wasted.

What to do? I did extensive rearch for options. I came up empty handed.

1. I can’t break it up to use for flower pot drainage but poo contamination is bad! I don’t need Dateline NBC to be in my backyard with a cotton swab.
2. While fashion forward, I couldn’t make it work as a head piece.
3. The only viable option seems to be turning it into a lovely flowerpot but my nebby neighbors might object.

So what did I do? I took it to Construction Junction to be reused. The donation attendant said that they were thinking about no longer accepting high flush toilets. Oh Crap! However, for now, I accepted the tax donation receipt and left my trouble maker behind. Now to deal with the two other water buffalos in my house!

- Jimmy

PS. What would you do with an old toilet? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

We’ve both been out of town a lot lately for work (and barely seen each other, let alone got any projects done). But a few weeks back we were here, and did make some progress on the deck. We got all of the part that’s going away taken down, and a new set of stairs built.

First, we removed all the decking from the area.

Then we worked on removing the railing where the new stairs would go. It was “decorated” with a random collection of tiles glued to plywood and was quite a pain to get out of there.

Then we got the old joists and beam cut out (we decided not to save the beam after all). It really opened things up. Here you can see Jimmy proudly standing in the great big hole where deck used to be!

And finally, we built some stairs, which apparently I forgot to snap a shot of. But they come straight out from the back door, about where I’m kneeling in this picture. (You can see more awful artsy tile patchwork on the right. That’ll be going as well.)

Well, it’s “perfectly good” in that it’s structurally sound and not rotten or falling apart. But it’s less than ideal in a few other ways.

It completely blocks the view of the back yard from the back of the house.

Besides blocking the view, the railing is ugly and unsteady.

(Please ignore my jiggling belly.)

It’s kind of boring.

So, we’re tearing it apart.

Fear not, however, we are making use of all the wood in other ways (because the greenest thing is using what you already have). The first project is building raised vegetable beds (see the how-to in an upcoming post).