This task of building my house is a solitary one for the most part. Today I am working on the kitchen infrastructure, the sink and work surfaces. One decision I made early regarding the kitchen was not to purchase the normal sets of kitchen cabinets. The variety of kitchen cabinets has more to do with the building and marketing of storage space than much to do with the function of the kitchen in my opinion.

The choice of sinks is another one that I find interesting, our local hardware chains, All the big box store types, basically carry anywhere from six to twelve different designs of double stainless steel sinks, ones for corners, ones with low divider walls, ones with big or small sections, the list goes on. The cost to take one away from the store varies from $100 plus to $3-500 and some get way more expensive than that. A goodly portion of the inhabitants of this planet have never even seen a kitchen sink! and we are inundated with a variety that makes the mind boggle.

At our local transfer station, (a neat euphemism for the sorting of rubbish that mostly ends up in a landfill somewhere else) I collected an assortment of double and single kitchen sinks, all of them in perfectly good condition. Stainless steel is a remarkably stable and durable material. I can only surmise that style changes or the sizes were the reason for their being discarded. We have a progresive attendant at our transfer station, one that allows users to remove things that might be of use and get a repreive from the crusher or burial.

A little work with some cleaner and then making the choice of which sink best fit our space. A new tap set was installed and the drains hooked up the our plumbing, and we were able to get the basics for a much lower cost. The counters that the sink fits into are another area that I have saved a fair number of dollars on. During a visit to the transfer station at a nearby larger town a year ago, I saw a couple of people throwing sheets of plastic laminate onto the landfill pile. The sizes of these sheets were not little but some were almost full sheets most were over twenty four inches by seventy two inches. My mind did a quick calculation of the cost of all that laminate, I calculated at least $500 worth. I collected most of the laminate that was not damaged by the act of throwing it onto the pile. Some creative layout and colour coordinating have provided us laminated counter tops that cost the time to collect, cut and glue down.

Perhaps the current state of affairs regarding the economy, will cause more people to think about the value of the materials that we waste on a daily basis.