Is there an alternative to the dreaded renovation skip?
I'm launching an exciting new series – and book! – to ease existential anxiety around the epic waste involved in doing up your home
Like this post? Click the ❤️ above and leave a comment: this helps Substack’s algorithm show it to more people.You can bet your questionable private donors’ bottom dollar that today’s headline is not one Donald Trump will have lain awake fretting about before he gave bulldozers the green light to plough into the White House’s East Wing this week.
And yet the renovation skip can represent a sort of existential dread for many of us. On one hand, you desperately, obsessively want that new kitchen/ bathroom/ extension; it’s all you talk about and photos on your phone of your kids or pets no longer dominate, having been subsumed by screenshot colour swatches, Pinterest boards and 20 different types of cabinet handle. Yet you are also quietly horrified, knowing your dream will involve also chucking out mountains of perfectly good but not-quite-right tiles/ flooring/ kitchen units/ bathroom basins/ taps, not to mention tearing out building materials and buying everything all over again but new and more ‘on-trend’ (a phrase I’m using only for illustration). But what else are you supposed to do? Change is invigorating. Badly-functioning spaces can promote bad feelings. Kirsty, Phil, Kevin et al loom large in our cultural lives. Also: fire regulations! Which make waste of much beauty (especially in the form of old doors). As one friend who renovated recently put it, “I just closed my eyes to the waste and pretended it wasn’t happening.”
Our old, but still solid Ikea Voxtorp units lay smashed up in the dreaded skip. I was heavily pregnant at the time, and I’m not ashamed to say I cried.
The truth is that the alternative involves hard, deep research and unshakeable commitment in the face of a team of contractors on a deadline who can’t afford to mess about reconfiguring and reusing all the salvageable parts of your old home. I know because I’ve been there. And anyone else who’s tried to get a trad-minded tradesperson on board with anything ‘different’ will know this pain. There’s a brilliant scene in Jessica Stanley’s recently published Consider Yourself Kissed that describes this difficult dynamic brilliantly when the main character, Coralie, who is mid-renovation, discusses her lighting plan with an electrician: “Everything Coralie had chosen was ‘really not normal’ and ‘sorry, not being funny, but just wrong’ People usually had spotlights in the kitchen… pendants were for living rooms…and for a property of this nature, he’d expect something fancier than the basic white switches she’d chosen.”
Telling your builder what you want is often a much harder task than it should be (often but not always, of course, there are many exceptions to this rule, they’re just not easy to find – more of which to come). This exact thing happened to me when we attempted a low-waste renovation in 2021. I talked through the idea of salvaging things with the project manager and briefed the lead builder; especially on our old kitchen, which was to be carefully dismantled and reconstructed into a utility room. However, on the day of dismantlement, the build team raced in with business-as-usual efficiency, poor communication with their manager and I came home to discover our old, but still solid Ikea Voxtorp units smashed up in the dreaded skip. I was heavily pregnant at the time, and I’m not ashamed to say I cried.
There was also a disastrous attempt to use sustainable cabinets from one, now defunct kitchen company to avoid flimsy, un-recyclable veneered chipboard, with fronts from Ikea’s recycled plastic range: I’m unable to forget about all the ways this went wrong every time I look at our eye-level oven, which sits at an angle because it didn’t quite fit. All this and yet I was an interiors journalist with endless tips and resources and experts at my fingertips. It’s HARD!
But even a few years later things are shifting. It’s getting easier to reduce waste when renovating but the research can still be overwhelming. Fear not! I have gathered resources, people, ideas and tips to help you to do just that and will be sharing them here.
Tell me: do you relate? And what homes-y rubbish-related questions do you want answers to? Hit ‘comment’ below or drop me a line!
Meanwhile, a teaser for my next piece, which will give you a little flavour of what’s to come – and it includes this tasty toilette…
Ooo, I need to go to Margot Green! Interiors aside, the name is great 😉. Also so excited about the series and book! We will eventually have to start this journey and I really want to do it properly