Spring brings lots of great things with it – the flowers, that fresh smell of rain in the air, the birds – but, of course, it also brings a lot of hard work with it. You have to dig up the garden, carry your umbrella everywhere, jump over piles of worms that pop up from the ground to roll across your sidewalk whenever it rains – and worst of all, do spring cleaning.
The good news is that spring cleaning doesn’t have to be that bad. It can be fun and even profitable if you take advantage of the principles of recycling and upcycling. If your house is anything like mine, there’s plenty of stuff that needs to be gotten rid of, but it’s hard to decide just what to do with it.
So what kinds of things can be done with what you’ve got? Let’s take a look.
Old Computer Equipment
Option 1: You could take your old printers and computer towers and make a huge postmodern sculpture in your backyard out of all of them. Try donating it to a museum, or selling it to an art collector. Convince them that it’s an artistic statement representative of the endless march of technology and how computers are ruining modern society. They’ll love it, no problem.
Option 2: Recycle your computer equipment. There are precious metals in some of the components that can be wasted if you just throw it away, and there are also plenty of salvageable materials besides gold.
Phone Cords
Option 1: This one requires some creativity. Make a curly wig out of those old, completely obsolete telephone accessories. It’ll be a fun project for the kids one day.
Option 2: Get rid of them the same way you ditched the old phone they were attached to, no looking back. If you want, these too can be recycled, due to the metal inside of the cord housing.
Old Lawn Furniture
Option 1: Play a fun game called “leave stuff on the neighbor’s lawn and see how long it takes them to figure out who left it there and dump it right back.” The whole community can get involved if you have enough lawn furniture, and there’s no way this could end in a series of vandalisms and arrests.
Option 2: Take off the cushions and sell the metal frames of your lawn furniture for scrap. It’s not as entertaining as the first option, but you’re probably less likely to garner the hatred of your neighbors. And besides, if you really want to play the above game, you could always go the classic route and play it with plastic pink flamingoes.
Canned Food
Option 1: You could just keep it forever. None of you are ever going to eat it, in all likelihood, but the kids can make castles out of all of your emergency food storage in the basement.
Option 2: Stop wasting so much space and get rid of the cans. You can eat their contents yourself if you’re brave and use the cans for other things, or you could donate them to a food drive or toy drive so someone else can have a can castle in their basement, too.
Maybe you’re not crafty enough to really make spring cleaning the blast it has the potential to be, but at the very least you can get rid of scrap materials around your house by recycling the stuff. You might even make a couple bucks out of it, it you go through the trouble of bringing it to the right place.
Your house will look and feel a lot better for the decluttering, and you can focus your energy on more important things, like tiptoeing around the spring worm infestations.
By Lilia Otori
Lilia has been writing on topics important to homeowners for nearly a decade now, and enjoys incorporating factual information into her writing. She recommends trying ballet for the worm problem, and recycling center such as Utah Metal Works for the spring cleaning problem.