The Spring cleaning inside of the home is done and now it’s time to move to the outdoors.   Thankfully, I have the help of some great landscape designers to help me do clean-up around the houses and to remove, repair and update the yards to erase all of the damage Mother Nature has done over this harsh winter season.

One thing that I did neglect last year was to remove the garden hoses from their wall mounts and put them into storage.  So, after testing a few of the hoses, I discovered they are leaking—badly—all over the place.   So, since a leaking hose is a useless hose, I now fixated on the task of recycling them.

Since I can’t seem to find anything online that tells me how I can recycle broken hoses the traditional way of recycling, I am now looking into the world’s of Upcycling and seeing what other crafty folks did with their hose recycling dilemma.

What about a hose basket?   It looks like this was all put together—very cleverly I might add—with the use of zip ties.  

This garden hose topiary….. um, am I the only one that feels like Medusa is living in my garden with this?    I like where they are going with this, but it screams jumble of snakes to me.  Maybe if it was painted a different color?  But bonus points for the creativity and effort for sure.

A hose chair!    This would be perfect for outdoor seating in… duh…the garden.    Clever.    It looks simple but I think this took way more effort and skill to pull off than it appears.

So, I’m off to make a hose basket now with my package of zip ties.

But in the meantime, I will say this:   If you’re going to buy new garden hoses, make sure you do two things:   Look for the ones made from recycled materials (there are lots made from old tires) and then learn from my lesson: pack them up and put them away the next time Old Man Winter comes along.  Thankfully, that many, many months away.   !

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 at 1:16 am and is filed under Home Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.