2022!! After the holidays, you have more stuff, no doubt. Because of the pandemic, and the global supply chain shortage, I rethought buying ‘new’ this past season. I either bought vintage objects from thrift stores, or started diligently repurposing objects in my storage locker. Instead of searching Amazon Prime for things I thought the family wanted, I recalled my Depression Era Grandmother Ruth who reused or reimagined everything in her house, from slivers of soap to old clothes.
Advertisers encourage Americans to replace the old and worn. Today we see reuse as a signal of a lower quality of life, but “reuse,” and creative “remaking” provides a higher level of enjoyment of objects in our surroundings.
A Collaborative Repurposing
Let me share with you a fun collaboration between myself and an expert trunk restorer in the Palm Springs area. I found him when a client hired me to appraise a Civil War era traveling valise. The photo shows my repurposed vintage 1930’s Hartmann Gibraltarized wardrobe “cushion top” steamer trunk. This trunk, originally black, and all banged up, came with a severe mold problem. I presented it this holiday season to my entire family for our multigenerational family cabin.
Randall Barbera of Antique Trunk Restoration and Design redid this trunk as a bookcase for my vintage leather books, per drawings I sent to him. Those books, eaten alive in storage, became another ‘restorative’ job for me. Originally this trunk featured a padded liftable section at the top, cushioned inside. We replaced the padding with a cobalt glass mirror. That former cushion top pressed down on flattop wooden hangers, mounted below, to prevent clothes from “bunching” together during travel. In the former hanger section Randall installed a sapphire glass tray. The section once used for hanging dresses now sports shelves backed with blue mirror glass. The hat mount section became another shelf, and the shoe section at the bottom still remains with its blue fabric dust cover. “Balzac” now lives there instead of shoes.
We left many of the original drawers because of the perfect color and leather pulls. I picked a blue for the outside of the trunk to blend with the theme of our cabin near a blue, blue lake.
A bit of history encouraged me to repurpose the old steamer trunk
Joseph S Hartmann founded his company in Wisconsin as an emigrant from Bavaria in 1877. I found an old advertisement featuring Babe Ruth traveling in 1925 with a trunk like mine. The Sultan of Swat paid $200 for it at the time, $4,500 in our dollars today. Hartmann used a patented steel frame to Gibraltarized his beautifully made trunks. My mother said that when she travelled to Europe via ocean liner in 1954 she took a version of my trunk.
Repurposing Not My Idea Alone
A website in my neighborhood helps people trade and give away objects. Seems like many of us re-thought our relationship to the material objects in their homes. Indeed we repurposed our homes to make room for schooling and office space.
When the Biden Administration ordered major shipping ports and shippers to increase working hours a neighbor, whose daughter worked for Federal Express, told me about all the new difficult consumer demands. This caused me to think about creative repurposing, not buying new, or buying from local artisans. I reimagined “old friends” around the house. My partner and I realized how easily a shopping addiction might develop while working all day in our home offices. Even shopping “sustainably new,” we STILL shopped. We visited our big expensive storage locker to reimagine several objects, instead of flooding our family cabin with BRAND NEW this holiday.
The results?
I refinished four walnut/mahogany dressers, and my partner recreated a 1960s hanging Lucite “grape” ceiling lighting fixture into a new kitschy table lamp (see above). He took an old red 1890s hurricane lantern from storage and recreated it as a lamp for the cabin.
I found it fun to search Reddit communities called r/anticonsumption, r/nobuy, and r/frugal for ideas for creative repurposing. And a simple little Depression era wire box object formerly in Grandmother Ruth’s St. Louis home inspired me. That box foxed me for years. What did she use it for? Well, in 1932 that wire box held soap crescents to extend the life of those slivers we discard these days without thinking.
