Old And Cheap Doesn't Have To Be Flimsy And Dirty - Recycled Furniture For Your Home

Recycled furniture can be made in two ways -

1. by recycling the raw material to create furniture that looks just like the original, or

2. by recycling finished products, retaining their shapes and characteristics for a creative addition to your house and home.

Wood is one of the best materials for recycling. It is extremely strong, durable, can be treated to make it nature-resistant, and has been the single most popular substance used in furniture for hundreds of years. Wood can be recycled in several ways -

1. Converting large pieces of furniture into smaller, leaner pieces. This happens very frequently nowadays, as people scale down their old furniture to fit smaller, newer homes. An ornate, 19th century ten-seater dining table, for example, may become a utilitarian, space-saving six-seater.

2. Disassembling furniture and reusing the parts creatively to form other articles

3. Wood shavings are used as animal bedding, or as stuffing for sofas etc

4. The paper industry can use up large amounts of wood waste

If you are too attached to your furniture to let it go in a yard sale, you can always consider downsizing it and allowing the waste to be recycled.

Recycled wood items can be made to look exactly like new ones, but they are a lot less expensive because the cost of extracting usable timber from trees has already been recovered. From cupboards and shelves to beds, chairs and tables, recycled wood finds its uses everywhere. As with all wood purchases, be careful while making your purchase to ensure that the wood is of the highest quality, and has been made resistant to termites and moisture.

Given the millions of tons of waste generated by the United States every year, recycled furniture manufacturers have a wealth of raw material to experiment with. The recent need to cut costs has also inclined them to work with materials that are already partly processed, and need minimal processing to make them fit for household use.

This has given rise to recycled furniture which is made using things you would not normally associate with furniture items. Stacks of used or defunct CDs can be used to make chairs, old barrels to make garage seats, paper is reused to make extremely durable chairs and tables... the list goes on. Today, the world's creative people are collectively racking their brains to create beauty and utility at the minimum possible cost - both to the individual and to the environment. For an adventurous spirit, these creative items can be an ornamental yet useful addition to the home.

Whether you want furniture that looks like furniture or furniture that looks like what it was made from, recycled furniture is definitely an option you could take into account. After all, who doesn't relish the feeling of money saved?