About four years ago we found a really nice free piano on craigslist and picked it up. When I was a kid I learned how to play (not well though) and in a classic moment of my parents being right (when I quit playing they told me I’d want to know how someday); I found myself longing to learn the piano again in adulthood. This had never really panned out until we were making plans for the birth of our daughter.

This seemed like the perfect opportunity to have an instrument for her to learn and for me to re-learn.

Four years on and we find that our choice to live in a small house coupled with all of the other interests that we share means that our piano was just too physically big and learning this instrument too time consuming.

I had enjoyed the instrument over those couple of years in small moments, playing made up songs with Sophie but it just wasn’t working out the way we’d hoped. Perhaps in the future we’ll find a keyboard or something a little more portable – for now though the piano had to go.

Craigslist as you may know is a great way to get rid of stuff but unfortunately often comes with the caveat that nothing is ever as easy as you’d hope. Within minutes of posting the piano (which Tina had refinished so it looks great) we had several people who wanted it. Going down the list based on response times I offered it to the first couple.

Unfortunately after a week or so of trying to work out the move it just wasn’t going to happen. We’ve found that however well meaning people are, craigslist responses usually take a similar arc of going through one or two sets of people before finally getting to the one person who is able to complete the transaction.

Perhaps this time it was a little different. Perhaps it was some bit of cosmic sign because the next person on the list turned out to be a musician looking to broaden her musical horizons to all of our benefit.

Once we worked out the logistics of the move she and her band of friends showed up at our door to take the piano. After some talk I discovered that they were more than just a band of friends but that they were actually a band – Old Hundred – and I really like what they’re up to.

So four years later the piano is returning to the University Area from where it came and it will be used to craft beautiful and challenging folk music for many years to come; or so I hope. Here’s to new friendships through giving and to new art thanks to making resources available to the artists that can use them.

Check out Old Hundred here on http://old-hundred.com/ and below in video:

The past couple of years we’ve dealt with using a pretty poorly thought out (actually not thought out, thus the reason it was a poor design) compost bin. I had used chicken-wire to create a couple of bins that were almost impossible to turn. Even with that poor design though we still were able to create some amazingly rich soil thanks to the power of nature and our willingness to nurture. After having heard for years about how shipping pallets make for great compost bin material we finally decided to “upgrade”. Over the past month we garbage picked a handful of shipping pallets. In the old days you could get shipping pallets from just about anywhere. Fortunately though most businesses are actually recycling/reusing them nowadays. I still didn’t have any real trouble sourcing the ones we used but it wasn’t as simple as it had been in the past.

Most shipping pallet compost bins are very rudimentary and are simply a matter of binding three together with twine or wire. You can see an example of how the Master Gardener’s build their pallet compost bins here [click]. Being that I can’t resist the opportunity to reinvent the wheel, I decided to disassemble and reclaim the wood from the pallets and then build our bin using the reclaimed lumber. I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out. Here’s my photo tour of the work. I spent about 4 hours on the project with most of that time spent reclaiming the wood with a brief design planning stage and a very quick build. SORRY PICTURE HOSTING GONE – WILL UPDATE WITH PHOTOS SOON

Step 1 – Gather Pallets:

Step 2 – Harvest the Raw Materials:

Step 3 – Layout the Design:

Step 4 – Nail and Trim:

Step 5 – Final Assembly:

And now it is time to start putting it to work.