One of my hobbies is restoring/building furniture in a zero waste kind of mindset, where all my materials are either from EIF or found on garbage day. Ideally the only waste is my own hours/calories and the electricity (though I do pay the local company for what they assure us is all green energy). If it’s okay with the instance, I’d love to share some of them here. (I think they’ll fit better here than in DIY as I’m not really giving the kind of thorough steps necessary to build one yourself)

I’m fairly active on my local Everything is Free page, which has been awesome. It’s a wonderful community dedicated to helping each other and reducing waste, and my first real step towards meeting my actual community since moving to this city (besides meeting my neighbors in the building and next door).

Awhile back someone posted an In Search Of for a saddle stand. They rented a horse but owned a saddle and apparently you can’t store them flat. They had a sewing machine case they were using for it, but were looking for a towel rack or similar that would look a little nicer.

I have a decent little wood shop in the basement of our apartment, and have hoarded a lot of lumber (and more lumber shows up on EIF every day) so I offered to just build one to her specifications. It was a really fun project, she was super friendly and flexible about the design/timeline, which worked out well because it took me a little over six months to make it – though most of that was time spent waiting for suitable materials to show up.

A quick search of the internet showed two types of stands I thought I could make – pedestal ones, and traditional ones with flat sides on either end. Flat sides were definitely more practical, as you can add a shelf to store things underneath, but they would have required 1”x12”s or something equivalent, which I didn’t have. So I decided to focus on the top and wait to see what showed up.

The slats are cut from old oak floorboards I pulled from a dumpster when a local furniture maker/finish carpenter was retiring and cleaning out his workshop. We got talking and he gave me some nice stuff as well, including some thin slats of some exotic hardwoods neither of us could identify. The hardwoods and oak floorboards I ripped to the final size using a tablesaw and plainer.

The project went on hold for lack of time and materials for awhile, until a neighbor threw away a nice pedestal table. They had disassembled the thing, including stripping all the hardware that normally hinged and supported the two leafs, so I didn’t feel too bad about taking its base right before the garbage truck got there (I took the top too, and plan to use it as well but I’ll get to that at the end)

I was then able to work out a design for the stand using the pedestal. I drew up two endcaps and cut them from some beautiful oak cabinet wood the furniture maker had given me (getting both endcaps out of the piece was tricky). Then, to support all the slats, I cut two smaller versions of the same shape from scraps of an ikea bookshelf I’d used in building an arcade cabinet (a different, more ambitious zero-waste project). The smaller pieces were pine, which wouldn’t match the oak base in grain, but it wouldn’t matter because they’d be hidden by the bigger endcaps and the slats on the tops/sides.

I assembled these pieces, stained them to match the base as closely as I could get it using stains I already had (mostly golden oak I already had, but also some very old stains from my grandparents’ basement which hadn’t been brought to the dump yet, and which helped get the different woods to match) and urethaned it with gloss polyurethane.

To support the upper part I took the last piece of a very warped 2”x”6, I’ve been slowly using up, sanded it until it was roughly square, and drilled holes so I could use the table’s original bolts to attach it to the stand. (I stained it as well). I leveled it the rest of the way and made sure the endcaps would cover it entirely by cutting a notch into either end. Then I set the top part on it, and drove six screws up through the bottom of that into either endcap.

It’s not my biggest zero waste woodworking project, but I think it came out well, and they were really happy when they came to get it which was nice.