Chicken Scratch Studio : Adventures of an Artist: Dumpster Dive

Door to start. Old dirty and damaged!

It's been quite a few years since I've physically thrown myself into a dumpster in order to rescue a "great find". In my youth I had been known to pack my car full of miscellaneous items and have friends sit, arms outstretched, holding the car doors together as we got the goods home to refinish. There also may or may not have been a 6 ft long dinosaur dumpster recue in the late 90's that resulted in the carnival sized prize animal, being strapped to my car top, head outstretched for the car ride home.... followed only later by it being decapitated from a low hanging tree and flung to the side of the road in my daring attempt to recreate the extinction of T-Rex... Through it all I've always maintained my love for old things, and making them new again. Cheap is great - but free is fabulous! Follow below while I make my neighbors old wood door (used for target practice) into a flower box for my newly landscaped back yard!

Target Practice

First things first - get your neighbors to rent a dumpster and clean out all their old crap so you can steal it! Next I scoured for some cool wall mountable baskets for flowers and found this old iron sun in the garage from the home's previous owners!

The door needed to be prepped so I got out my favorite manly secret weapon "BONDO" and started patching and sanding to get a smoother surface while still maintaing the aged look of the door.

BONDO

Mix the hardener.

Mixing...

Spread on with spatula. Hurry it dries fast!

Make-shift table!

After the door was BONDO'D and my house smelled like crazy fumes...I got out the palm sander and got to work sanding down the door. Once sanded it took about 3 layers of paint to even out where I had bondo'd and where the original door wood was. You can prevent this many layers by doing a primer..but I'm cheap and just used what I had!

Here we go!

All finished...with painting that is!

So after the paint had dried the door sat for about 3 weeks just begging for me to pick back up the project I'd started and get it finished! I ended up flipping the door upside down, so there was more space to center the basket, and the flowers would hang higher in the backyard against the house. Note to self : have your drill charged because once you get the motivation to work, and the drill won't go..it makes it really hard to sit and wait!

Screws in place.

Basket hung.

Now that the basket was hung all I had to do was plant the flowers and set the door in place. See below for the pictures of what the area behind my house looked like before some extensive landscaping. That project will be in a later post - Enjoy!