Reducing, reusing and recycling my footprint

High excitement here at West Cottage!

My mini came home the other day.

Our friend Wayne made a detour with his flat-bed picked up and carried my mini to the cottage where we put it into Robert’s garage, took out lights, windows and inspected the rusty bits which need to be cut out and new bits will need welding on in readiness for a fresh coat of paint.

All in all I’m so very lucky that this shell is pretty minimally rusty. You might not realise that most people spend hours and hours treating rust in mini shells. They are most notorious for rusting.

Oh yes, fresh coat of paint. Oxfordhire summer cloud grey. That’s what I want. With chrome detailing and black upholstery. Just like this shadowy red kite against the sky.

Actually, the proper colour name in old Austin mini catalogues is Tweed grey.

I’m so aware that I’m putting another car on the road to burn more fossil fuel and, even though we will make sure it is a clean engine and runs efficiently and economically, I’m still very interested in saving and re-purposing rather than buying reproduction parts. (Also, I love vintage much more than repro, so no contest really! 🙂 )

So off to the scrap yard from vintage car heaven we went today!

Robert knew exactly where an early Mark 1 mini was, and, although it’s seen better days, we still salvaged a black rear seat, a steering column and some tail lights.

This yellow mini I’m sitting in has retro seats which have a houndstooth design. Really nice and funky. We’ll remember for next time. But this yellow mini had fantastic door cards. (Those are decorative vinyl sides which adhere to the back side trim)

A third mini, sort of a funky pink one gave us a real Bakelite steering wheel, and, later when we tried it, it fit on the steering column! The mini is coming together.

This afternoon, at home, I made myself a cup of tea in this little set. It is a pottery made in Torquay of red Devon clay. It’s a collector’s type thing, but I’m not a collector; I just found it in the car boot sale and loved the sweet old sentiments on the pieces.

Robert thinks it’s tat (this means tchotchkes) For all Terry Pratchett readers, like we are, he actually said that the set looks like something Nanny Ogg would bring back home from “foreign parts”…lol. But I like it. And it fits right in with my recycle and reuse mind set. 🙂  We even got the Skip bin hire service as they do not dump the waste they collect into landfills and sure that it all gets recycled.  Now recycling products and saving the environment is more of my style.

Speaking of, I’ve ordered this incredible book and it’s come. It’s an altered book and it’s amazing. Talk about reusing and re-purposing!

British artist Tom Phillips took a forgotten Victorian novel by W H Mallock called A Human Document and painted and collaged over all the pages leaving some text showing thru, creating a new story.

Not only is it an absolute beautiful artistic piece over 370 pages, it’s a pleasure to read the story.

It’s giving me so many wonderful ideas!