Productive and Creative DIY Solutions Always Please Me

Growing up in the Western World, and as a child of baby boomers, I guess I'm the last male generation who consider the shelf with power tools, or even the DIY room/basement, a thing of male achievement. Male pride even.

Just like the obvious DIY skills.

When I was barely an adolescent I learned lots helping my father finishing the house, paving the car park, building an additional wooden shed (both garden shed and garage), and heck, even tiling the kitchen and living room with a marble feature wall.

At some point the Batcave was my project, even though we didn't have a basement and I ended up insulating the attic. It never became a real Batcave though, I was soon adolescenting full-time and, well there were other distrctions in life.

Once I graduated high school, life quickly took a turn and soon I had left my native country to eventually become a so-called digital nomad. A lifestsyle which I think is still mine, although I may be in a en extended period of relaxation. DIY has mostly been ignored since, although I have been guilty of making an iPad stand out of egg carton for example.

Need a creative low cost solution and have some trash around? Sure, I will find something to upcycle.

It wasn't until I ended up in the last European country where I would stay slightly longer until I got to notice people who had to do with less. Mediterranean cultures, even if being gentrified ever more, knowingly don't have the highest GDPs nor do many people have a reasonable disposable income.

Cyprus, historically being tied with Greece, was hit hard when Greece almost defaulted and Cyprus itself had to be bailed out by the E.U.

As such, it was both amazing and awesome to hear that the country would be the first one with a Bitcoin ATM. I had left already for South EAst Asia when the banking sector meltdown happened in Cyprus, but I kept in touch and kept following that little bit of rock in the water just below Turkey. A place I could some day call home, maybe.

But I digress. This extended intro was only meant to lead to my expression of love for cheap and low cost, productive solutions. That egg carton iPad stand, remember. Not to tell the story of FknMayhem in Cyprus.

Back to the topic.

Currently, renovation projects are ongoing in the compound I live in. In a South East Asian archipelago. For those coming from the First World, that may be quite the thing to experience btw.

Construction workers in flip-flops, or fake Crocs, all sleeping on the concrete floor they are making/made the day before. That's right, most of the time they come from the province and if smaller, private projects like this, the only one usually not living on-site is the foreman. The workers themselves usually stay from Monday early AM until Saturday around noon when they go back home.

I live in an awesome compound, a place with great people, and thus the builders are pretty much integrated in the communal flow. Which isn't always normal here, as this developing country does have a tendency to separate workers from inhabitants. Also domestic helpers. But that's another story, one which shakes my principles to the bone, but as they say, it's cultural.

Each day though, when I go downstaris for a smoke, I chat with the builders, we smoke together and often - I think I'm easily pleased - I have to giggle introvertly at something I see.

At one of their tools which I find absolutely amazing.

A metal handsaw.

A DIY handsaw.

Who needs hardware stores and brand tools if you constantly have metal rods around and can just make your own handsaw?

Sue me, laugh at me, but this white dude who once was a C-executive of a company, loves this type of creative productive solutions.

I may indeed be easily pleased, but noticing and knowing how to use what many wouldn't consider anymore is an asset. A much better skill to have than to be a drone slave to the constant marketing prowess of multinational corporations and aspire to change everything individualized for run of the mill labeled same as everybody stuff.

My (local) ex more than once used to eyeroll at ideas I had, until eventually she did see the outcome and appreciated the solution. Until then her life was one like that of most people: let's call a specialist.

Low-cost ingenuity which does the job just as well, maybe even better than what you tend to find in the stores is unadulterated 💜.

Bonus Photos

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Some of my own low-cost DIY and upcycling projects this millennium.

 

My coffee shop, 140coffee back when in North West England. Completely furnished with second hand furniture bought from the next door weekly carboot market. Total budget for crockery, furniture, and paint: USD 1,200.

The books were all drop-offs, donations, and bookcrossing.

The counter, decorated with (recent) issues of the local university's students paper.

 

My previous bedroom. Before and after.

Yes, I'm a techdude with a penchant for bohemian