First off I need to thank my friend Lori for the idea. I met Lori online about a year ago and we have been communicating ever since. She is a fellow do it yourselfer and we often share ideas for using salvage materials for home repairs. Lori has her own booth on Bonanzle where she sells her hand crafted items to supplement her disability income. She lives with a painful neurological disorder and is raising her own kids plus a niece. Her home and vehicle seems to be always crying out for some kind of repair too.
She thought it would be a good idea for me to open a booth. I laughed and said…with what. I have nothing to sell! We can’t afford to do crafts and if we could I can’t do much in that area, Amy can, but often we have no money for craft supplies. When we do buy yarns or materials it’s for her to make winter socks, leg and arm warmers, hats, mittens etc.. things our family needs. Our income is strictly budgeted to cover our bare basics and what we might have left over is usually sunk in either car or home repair needs.
She says…well I can donate a few of my things for you to sell through your store. I thought that sounded pretty good, she makes some really nice things. I gave her my log in stuff and asked her to set up my booth because I have no clue how to sell things.
She set it up and loaded in a few items, then had the idea of taking some of the pics of my animals and some pics of Amy and I at our local fund raiser events and using those listings to tell a bit about our family and why this kennel build is so important. Some of my friends who are also on Bonanzle liked the idea of contributing items to sell through my booth.
Soon Peg asked me to select a few items from her booth and she would load them into my store for me to sell for the project. Peg has a really nice store full of beanie babies she too is an animal lover and rescuer. Now I had more items and as the booth started finding viewers another friend wanted to make me a banner and she helped me find my way around a bit. She’s also going to make a digital art piece to sell through the Crippled Critter Booth. Karri makes some awesome digital art and she has a booth on Bonanzle.
I started to promote the booth a bit and Sherri a friend on many other sites I am a member of wanted to contribute some Avon Items to sell through my booth. Sherri has a hard life but she is a strong, loving and supportive person. She has a lupus which is a very difficult disorder to live with and her husband lives with cancer. This wonderful couple has learned to support each other through illness and recovery time and again and try to make ends meet with Sherri’s Avon sales. Please do check out her booth, you just might find something you didn’t even know Avon sold.
So now I have an active Bonanzle booth. I told my mom about it and she will knit a pair of socks to donate through the booth. Speaking of my mom. She donated funds for me to buy a new window air conditioner so I won’t be swelling up and suffering in the South Carolina heat. Both of our AC’s blew within days of each other. Thanks to some online advice my son is able to run his on low and it’s a bit more tolerable in his room. Mine is worthless and needs to be replaced. My mom more than anyone in the world knows I’m a strong survivor and when I complain about something it’s because I have already tried to live with, repair, replace, or raise what is needed to handle the problem before I reach out for help. I do have a lot of pride, it’s all I have that is mine and totally mine, I earned it through being strong and adaptive. It hurts my pride when I can’t do something on my own, and since my pride is all that I have that is truly all mine and 100% earned by me…I don’t like to put myself in a position where I lose pride in myself. There is no pride in begging…so I don’t beg. I acknowledge that I need help and when help is given I have a perfect history of always repaying or paying forward MORE than I received because nothing comes free. To me donations are not gifts…they are debts and if I don’t repay the donor, I’ll pay it forward every time. That is the only way I can accept a donation without hurting my pride.
Back to my booth…LOL…check it out. All funds raised or donated will go towards building a stockade style fence to surround an acre of property as well as a feline containment netting system to prevent cats from escaping the kennel.
This is the stockade fencing panels available at my local Lowes. You can click on the photo for more info from Lowes. This is what we intend to surround 3 sides of our property with. The rear half my property is on a tree line and we can re-use the existing kennel walls
to build that fence wall.
We will need feline containment netting and for that we will need several pipes, the cheapest is low grade conduit pipe with T adapters on the top. Nylon netting will be stapled along the fence walls, then a cable strung through the net which will expand 4 feet away from the fence and threaded through the T’s at the top of the pipes driven into the ground. Then all the cables will be pulled tight and we will have a 4 foot net canopy that will top cats from climbing the fence and going over the top.
We have an acre of land, but are unable to use it until we put up a fence. The reason…it’s pure and simple. My neighbors do not like us because we don’t live the way they think we should live. We live the way that suits our family. We are a non drinking family, we don’t do drugs. We are not materialistic and don’t spend money on making the outside of our home pretty. We like to hang our granny panties on the clothesline instead of using an expensive dryer. We offer love and care to special needs animals and devote our life to them and to recycling, and reusing discarded items and supplies for our family projects. This is us…we don’t like nor want a pretty property with perfectly trimmed grass and trees. We don’t want to live quietly inside our box…I mean home and make our neighbors happy. We want to be outside making something useful out of whatever it is we happen to find.
We don’t buy if we don’t have to and we use odd materials like tires, washer tubs, etc for our own projects. Come on…don’t tell me you haven’t heard of building with tires or using washing machine or dryer tubs to plant in? They are huge and already have drainage holes and you can usually find them free. Same with tires.
Check out this Tire Retaining wall…now that is a great way to build something…dunno if I like the color though.
Here is someone using a washing machine tub as a planter.
Old refrigerators, freezers and bath tubs can be laid down on their sides filled with rocks and soil and make an excellent raised garden bed. There are so many ways to use “junk” if you are allowed to collect it in your own yard. I’m in a wheelchair and I would love to garden, but we need to have raised or hanging gardens for me to do that. Gardening would greatly reduce our food bill and with the economy growing worse by the day growing your own food is the most logical way to make sure you can eat properly. Why should we be living with constant complaints for trying to improve the lives of our own family through the reduce/reuse/recycle method that has been taught to everyone since grade school?
Yep I might be crazy…but check this out, what a way to recycle an old bath tub turn it into a sofa!
Many were happy for us when a wheelchair ramp was built. We heard questions about when we were going to get rid of this pile of scrap lumber. It looks like crap…when are you going to get rid of it? Why do you have all that stuff there?
Well this pile of 20 year old salvaged lumber from a donated deck that was cut up with a chain saw and trucked here
Was turned into a very useful wheelchair ramp which also serves as a ramp for elderly, blind and physically challenged animals
We do things differently but our “junk” collections have purpose. We reuse and recycle as much as we can. It’s earth responsible and it’s financially responsible. Why go buy something when you don’t really have the money and you can pick it up for free because someone else threw it out? Had I been ordered to remove my collected salvage because it was offensive to neighbors I would not have a wheelchair ramp today and someones discarded deck would be filling up the landfill instead of going to good use.
We need the fence so we can continue with other projects that our family needs. We can always find salvage…we just need a place to keep it and since we have an acre of property we should be able to keep it here. Our animals deserve to use the entire property too, there is plenty of room for them to roam but we can’t build a chicken wire kennel where it can be visible from the street or along neighbors property lines. Our kennel is small and they deserve more room as do the humans in our family.
Since we are paying for an acre of land it would be really nice if we could use it
Posted via email from rayhawk’s posterous
