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Riding the bench in our consumer culture
For the bargain shopper or the homesteader of limited means, there are few words more magical than this one: free. It is a word whose power really derives from our consumer culture. As consumers, we are always—consciously or subconsciously—on the lookout for bargains, and what could be a better bargain than free? At the same time, why are these free things available? When these things come from a big business, it’s usually an incentive to buy more (“buy one, get one free” or “free widget to the first 100 customers” or what have you). At the same time, more and more ordinary people are giving away things for free, from the time-honored tradition of putting out to the curb along with your garbage other things that someone else might use (or that the garbage collectors will eventually pick up) to the burgeoning “freecycle” movement—typically e-mail listserv groups where individuals in a particular area post items that they want to give away (or, in some cases, ask for things they would like to get). The name “freecycle” plays on our environmentalist leanings to recycle our trash by instead letting others reuse what we no longer need. When moving, for instance, through a freecycle site I was able to give away the serviceable full-sized mattress I didn’t have room for to a woman whose son had outgrown his twin bed (actually, I don’t know what that means, since I slept in a twin bed most of the time I was growing up and again when I went off to college and grad school—the point, though, is that someone else got use out of it), and my fiancée and I were able to help another young couple defeat boredom by giving away the extra copy of Scrabble that our combined household now had.
In any case, these things are often free precisely because of the consumer culture in which we live. Good little consumers that we are, we are constantly buying new things—sometimes new versions of things we already have, sometimes additional things that take up the limited space we have. We throw away or give away the excess that our consumer culture has helped us to procure for ourselves.
While out in rural upstate New York, I found that my best friend has developed highly attuned senses for things that are being given away. Recently, he saw some chicken wire out in front of someone’s house. He stopped and went up to ask to make sure that it was okay for him to take it. The woman he talked to told him that she was finally getting her packrat husband to clean out the basement and he was welcome to the chicken wire and to take a look through the “junk” in their basement. While talking to her, the husband came home and to make a long story short gave my friend four tires that were the right size for his dad’s van and looked to be in virtually new condition—a $300-$400 find, free for the taking!
While we were out there, coming back to his little homestead with a pickup truckload of straw, my friend came to a screeching halt. “Did that sign back there say free?” We made a three-point turn in the middle of the road (ah, rural America!) and went back to see this wooden bench with a sign that did indeed say free on it.
How perfect! At a recent shindig where my friend had fired up the pizza oven and had family and neighbors over, we’d both noticed the severely limited seating, and here was a large bench free for the taking. As we lifted it up into the truck, though, it became evident why this bench was being given away—it wasn’t the chipping paint job that relegated this bench to the curb—it was the leg that had broken off. You can see in the picture the basic design of the legs: a thick board coming down with two smaller “feet” attached to either side. You can’t see it in the picture (below), but the way that these legs were attached to the bench itself was similar: the central board had two smaller boards just like the feet (only longer, to span the whole width of the bench) and then these were attached to the seat from above. One of them, however, had cracked down the middle and allowed the leg to break off. It showed signs of having been cobbled back together at least once, but now was thoroughly not attached.
Far from causing us to put the bench back on the side of the road, however, this just made us want to rise to the challenge of fixing it.
These two stabilizing pieces had been bolted onto the main leg, but that had evidently been quite some time ago, as the bolt was quite rusty. Despite the large span between the end of the bolt and the wood, where the missing board would have gone, the second stabilizing piece seemed to be pretty secure, so we decided to work around the old bolt rather than try to remove and replace it. This we did by cutting a 2x4 to the appropriate size and then drilling holes to accommodate the old bolts. We then took some large nails that would go through the new piece, the central piece, and just into the other stabilizer to attach the new board to the old leg. These same nails took the place of old rusted screws that had gone through the front and back of the bench to secure the legs. A dozen nails, scrap of 2x4, and a half hour of work later and we had a very functional bench that cost almost nothing. My friend could, at the first thought of needing more seating, have gone out to a big box store like Walmart and gotten several plastic chairs or a bench, but a little patience offered a much more economical solution.
More than that, we had the satisfaction of having solved the handful of problems that this project presented. Though they were relatively small difficulties, there was a real sense of accomplishment that came from having solved them. More and more in our consumer economy, we give up these satisfactions of problem-solving and personal ingenuity, along with hard-earned money, in exchange for convenience. A little patience was rewarded with more than a little savings.
This is the bench, all ready for a pizza party or an evening around a campfire.