A Weekend Project: its not easy being green

I was reading the Styles section of the paper today and came across the article about everyone jumping on the green wagon and living with a false sense of greenness just because it’s trendy and fashionable. Instead of buying the new designer biodegradable pants, wear the jeans you bought last year. And just because you shop at Whole Foods, doesn’t mean you are contributing to the environment if you are buying raspberries in the winter, since they are being flown in from Chile.

So I’ve begun thinking more about the 3 R’s as spelled out on the EPA’s web site.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.
And we decided to add another R:
Refuse-refuse buying all that crap that litters your life, if at all possible.

Bottled water consumption is another hot topic of the moment. Apparently there is an estimated 38 billion bottles that are thrown away and end up in landfills every year (even with those who recycle). “In a world where there are more than a billion people with no reliable source of drinking water, this seems very wasteful:, especially if we can drink water out of our taps.

So last month I moved in with my husband, into his tenement style apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Ever since we met, and I had the pleasure of touring his museum apartment, I’ve wanted to update the corner between the kitchen sink and the front window where this bathtub sits, swathed with yards and yards of shower curtain liner. There is so much fabric, yet the floor around the tub still seems to get wet when ever I take a shower. And I am too short to reach the hook that holds up the hand held shower head, so I have to precariously jamb this hand-held device between the shampoo holder and the washrag hook in order to free up my hands to wash my hair.

Thus the bathtub in the kitchen improvement job began this weekend. Actually this project began about a year ago, when Chaim and I began looking for tile, being thrown out on the street or being sold in thrift stores, and stoop sales.

AFTER the tiling.

Since I am not working this summer, and because I decided to follow the 4 R's of living, I had Chaim go out and scour the neighborhood for some more tile. Since moving to the luxurious Upper East Side, I've found that this Manhattan neighborhood is a difficult place to live. For example, hardware stores here do not sell hardware, just a lot of plastic containers and lightbulbs, or operate on some type of extortion system with their pricing, or in the case of Home Depot, (across the street from Bloomingdales) they don't stock anything in their one square block store, but rather everything is stored in Jersey and we would have to wait a week to get anything. Oh how I miss Brooklyn and Sids Hardware!

Therefore, Chaim, following in his great grandfather's footsteps, who was in the "merchandise redistribution business", set out for a day of dumpster diving. He spent a good portion of the last Saturday in June, looking for tiles on the U.E.S. It proved to be a good day to troll for trash as people were moving this weekend, and throwing things out. Along with a pile of old plates and marble floor tiles, he returned with a few more items of interest. True to the weekend recycling theme, they were all green in color.

a much needed dustpan found on 76th street.

a green jacket found on 1st Ave.
notice the recycled K-SHE 95 patch Chaim sewed on,
which covers the Nautica logo.

Hallway gallery with art found in a 10 block radius of our apartment.