Modern Interior Design For A Net Zero Prefab : About Reuse
While I embrace clean cutting-edge new modern design, I also adore any opportunity to reuse and repurpose old items in another way, and am happily recycling many reclaimed items for our own modern prefab green home.We really shouldn't be dragging out furniture to the net zero prefab modern house yet while the interior is under construction. I know better, I do. Just know that.
Our most recent find was a teak modern Danish bed we found in Restore (RVA's Habitat for Humanity's salvaged materials / donated items outlet), now recycled into our bedroom in the still-unfinished prefab green home.
Now that we're installing a wood stove, I am going back to my original idea of that south-east space: grouping floor pillows around the more casual comfort of the wood stove, surrounded with old Popular Mechanics books, Countrywide Magazines, and "How to do XYZ" books where you can lounge around and... learn how to do stuff.
Facing the "view," the south end of that room will be more "ring in the cocktail hour!" - More formal, here you will find hardbound vintage books on mid-century architecture, style, as well as books on off grid living and prefab architecture.
I began to look for some modern floor pillows for the area around the wood stove. Within minutes, I discovered one modern retailer that was selling a floor pillow for...
$590.
To throw on the floor. A pillow.
Mod retailer: You are kidding me. Oh but you aren't. You're selling $590 *floor* *pillows* and you're not embarrassed?!?
A friend jokingly responded: "Are we in the wrong businesses? We should look at floor pillows again...sounds like there's potential!"
You need to know that $590 floor pillow was UGLY.
Floor pillows. *A* floor pillow for $590.
And it would just get stained, scuffed, worn out being scraped along a floor... there must be a better way to create a floor pillow that is stylish, inexpensive, modern, yet durable.
I stewed a moment, then came up with a solution:
1. Ok. 1st you get some scrap wood. Build a mod, sleek, low frame (preferably with a handle, and yes it needs a bottom). For ours, I will reuse some of the VMI basketball flooring to build a low, 2"-ish high frame.
2. Fill the frame with rows of tightly rolled old clothes that now have holes (I have 10 shirts that just died after ONLY fifteen years of use, *sob!*)... It will give a modern effect of Missoni-ish lines/fabric while reusing clothes you can't even donate to a thrift store! The more different fabrics, the more interesting and mod the pattern!
3. Pack it in tightly so it's sleek and smooth and there ya go:
A high-end, modern, chic and didja hear it was by the *coveted brand* Green Modern Kits DESIGNER free floor pillow! ; )
[Now I can use my fave shirt (which I still never threw out despite 6+ holes, reused, at the net zero SIPs prefab!)]
THIS JUST IN: Related in being adverse to waste:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06about.html
Trending topic: Clothing retailer H & M destroys unsold clothes in lieu of donating.
What a SHAME, what a waste.
I jokingly reacted with, "Think of all the *floor pillows* they coulda made!" but really, when you think of all the needy schoolchildren... WHAT A SHAME.... What a WASTE!
Labels: green living, interior design, prefab, recycling, reuse




















































