Junk? It's all in how you look at it

I don't know about you, but when I see a smashed hubcap, I see junk.

Steve Dodds sees art. Dodds, an architect, is the author of "Re-Creative: 50 Projects for Turning Found Items Into Contemporary Design" (Penguin, 2006). It's the kind of book that is so simple it makes you feel stupid.

"Take a piece of metal from a junkyard, clean it, mount it on a white board, hang it on a bare wall in a Manhattan loft and hit it with an art light. It can look great," he insists.

Clearly, some people have vision I lack.

His specialty lies in seeing new ways to use stuff most of us throw out. When his sister-in-law sat on a lampshade and crushed it, he re-covered it with spent subway tickets and gave the shade a new, more interesting veneer and a second life.

Empty dog food cans? Dodds stripped the labels, connected a row of five cans to a metal rod using thick elastic ponytail holders, and attached the rod with pushpins to a bulletin board above his desk. The result: a multitasking pencil holder.

Old vinyl records? He slipped them inside a T-shirt, ironed them till they could bend like sticks of gum, removed them, then curved them around a cardboard tube so they looked like Js. Then he stacked four bent records, connected them with grommets, and hung them on the wall by inserting a nail through the top record's spindle hole to make a mail rack.

"Sure, you can buy a new mail rack or lampshade," he said. "But it's cheaper in the long run to make something unique that expresses your life." Plus you have a story more interesting than "I bought it at Pottery Barn."

I try to imagine what would happen if I started repurposing in my home:

"Honey, look at our new living room art."

"That looks like my steering wheel. That is my steering wheel!"

"And those silk ties you never wear? I wove them into this crib blanket."

"My ties! What crib?"

One rule, says Dodds: Don't repurpose stuff you're using. Only stuff you're not.

Dodds and I played a game. I threw at him pieces of common trash -- well, not literally -- to see what he would make of them.

Plastic water bottle. Collect a bunch of caps. Wire them together to create a doormat or a purse. Then cover the bottle with fun fabric and attach a rope hook, for a hanging flower vase.

Wine corks. Wrap 75 or so (that's some party) in a tight circle with a strip of bent wood, like walnut. Secure the ends of the wood and make a trivet.

Wire coat hangers. Cut the ends off to get lots of straight pieces of wire. Stick them into a pre-drilled board so all the ends stand up, and use it to store files. On a larger scale, I offer, they could be a bed for an unwelcome guest.

"You're getting the hang of this," he says. Not really. The more we talked, the less creative I felt.

"How do you come up with this stuff?" I asked.

Here's how he says you, too, can be re-creative:

Think laterally, not literally. Look at things not for what they are, but for their elemental properties.

Take a door. When architects see a door, they don't see a door. They see a big, flat, lightweight, sturdy plane. This is why there probably isn't an architect in America who hasn't once laid a door across two file cabinets and made a desk.

Find a new function for little-used things. This is how the top to Dodds' wok became a fruit bowl. He turned the lid upside down, placed it on a stand and filled it with fruit.

Amplify trash with repetition. This can give an otherwise ordinary object more impact. Ask what you would do if you had two of something, or four, 10 or 100, like Andy Warhol did when he contemplated Campbell's soup labels.

Don't buy new. Everything you need is already made. If people would buy more home decor from flea markets, garage sales and antique stores instead of from the mall, they would do the planet a favor and have more fun. When we redistribute instead of buying new, we save not only the planet's resources, but also all the costs of advertising, packaging, shipping and distributing.

I'm definitely motivated to repurpose more and buy less new, but you won't catch me dead with a bottle cap purse.

Marni Jameson is a nationally syndicated columnist who lives in the Denver area. You may contact her through her Web site www.marnijameson.com.