When our guest blogger Joan recently told us about her stepdaughter, a person after our own creative, recycling hearts, she bragged about one of Carmen’s creative projects.

The old leather belt works great as a long-lasting door-sweep.

Fifteen winters ago when wind was blowing in under Carmen’s front door, she took an old leather belt with a broken buckle, cut the belt to the width of the door, and screwed it in place. Her door happens to be steel, so she used self-tapping screws. For wooden doors, you could use sheet-rock screws or nails.

“You don’t even notice the leather sweep at the bottom,” reports Joan. “It doesn’t tear and shred like other door-sweeps can. It even keeps the ants out.”

Carmen’s solution for the door’s beat-up interior resulted in a creative totem-pole mural that cheers everyone who sees it.

The doors themselves are also recycled. Where a former slider used to lead to the back porch, Carmen has installed swinging double doors with diamond-shaped window panes. She has used the lower panels for all sorts of creative art projects with her young grandsons. Most recently, Carmen painted the door white with ivy vines creeping up the lower panels.

“She believes in the house serving her purposes, not the other way around,” says Joan.

The recycled front door also has a story. “Years ago the plastic bits that make a steel door look like carved wood fell off,” Carmen says. “I simply sprayed the outside with brown paint. The dents are still there and so are the pieces of plastic rod that attached the phony wood to the door. It now serves as a sign to would-be thieves that I obviously am not worth robbing.”

The inside of the door looked pretty beat up, too. So in a creative frenzy, Carmen cut fabric and hot-glued it to the door to make a Northwest-type mural. She screwed on a wooden frame to hold down the edges. “It was quick and rustic and was more of a fix for my emotions than a tidy solution,” she says.

The Savage Sisters love the added bonus of fixing one’s emotions while being fiercely frugal. It soothes our souls just to hear about Carmen’s creativity. We hope it does the same for you.

Written by Fiercely Frugal Savage Sister Diana. Photos by Carmen Davis-Stevens.

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© 2009, The Savage Sisters