Recycle: Make Your Own Eco-Friendly and Creative Designs - Over 60 Projects for Home & Garden

UK designers Moira and Nicholas Hankinson (Garden Ornaments, Salvage Style in Your Home) return with another winning collection of found-object round-the-house projects. Scouring auctions, yard sales and salvage yards, the Hankinsons repurpose everything from slate roof tiles (for table mats), and copper pipe (for an attractive curtain rod) to window shutters (CD racks) and bed springs (candle holders), covering every room in the house as well as the backyard. The concept seems fanciful, but decorators with a love of rustic pieces will find a wealth of great ideas in the book, as common objects such as hip tiles (roofing tiles used to cap the joints of roofs) find new life as ceiling lights and sconces, and an old cattle trough is turned into an attractive water feature for the garden. While not every project has detailed information on how to recreate it, most do, and in those cases the text and accompanying illustrations are clear and straightforward. Not every idea displays the same level of ingenuity-the wood block table, for example, is literally a chunk of wood that has been sanded smooth-but this work makes a great jumping-off point for readers' own unique, useful redesigns.