Spent most of the day dismantling a sofa to take to the tip. We offered it for free on Freecycle and the local Facebook, but no-one wanted it. We can’t take it to the charity shop because it doesn’t meet modern fire safety requirements. So I thought I’d do my bit for recycling and take it apart so I could recycle the wood, metal and fabric. What a horrible job.
It was glued and stapled together with a million staples – really, one every couple of centimetres. At first I started pulling the staples out but then I just started cutting the cloth off them. Finally, I just got an electric saw and cut through the main cross pieces and bundled wood, cloth and staples all together for the tip. I did manage to separate the springs and a few squares of cloth, so I can recycle those. Next time I need to get rid of a sofa I’ll just get a chainsaw and saw it in half and take it to the tip.
Things aren’t built for recycling, that’s the problem. No-one thinks, “What will happen to this once it’s reached end of life? How will people reuse it or recycle it?” I’m sure they could have used screws instead of staples: screws through a toothed bar to fix the cloth on the wood frame, and screws though clips to keep the bed of springs to the frame. Then you could have just whizzed round with an electric screwdriver to take the thing apart. As it was, hands were covered in cuts from the half pulled out staples, and I don’t want to try recycling a sofa again!
In the lining of the sofa I found fragments that had fallen down there over the years: a two-pence piece, a twenty-pence piece, some red paper clips, a fridge magnet of a cartoon character and a small green stalk that I think used to be the trunk of a palm tree. It came with a little doll who was sitting in a tropical garden, I think with a fountain and a sun lounger. I don’t remember the details of it, but IO felt sad. This was the sofa we held the children on as babies, that we read them stories on when they were older, and now I was sawing it up. It was heartbreaking, really, realising how quickly time goes, and how quickly age and death are approaching.
So how did the third week go anyway?
Things that went well
- Photography: I learned more and found a way of making the pictures useful for people. This was a breakthrough!
- …errrrm.
Things that went badly
- Webby things: I couldn’t get my Next.js sites to deploy, and the laptop that I bought arrived broken.
- Art: I didn’t do any. The art day was the day my new laptop arrived, and I was fiddling around with that, and with other computers so I could work out how to do web development without buying a new laptop.
- Printmaking: well, it was a learning experience.
- Writing: I didn’t do any, except this journal. That’s because on Thursday (writing day) I was socialising and setting up a test site for PH.
- Fitness: I only went for one run.
So let’s see. A big theme is how much time I’ve spent getting computers and software to work. Imagine if I’d spent all that time drawing – I’d be brilliant by now! I definitely need to cut down on the laptop time, and choose more robust web technologies.