The Art of Upcycling and Guerilla Economics

Guest post by The Orangutan

My parents were Depression Kids; born in the early 1930’s. My maternal grandfather took several pay cuts but cherished his employer kept him employed during those tough times. My mother would retell stories from those days of visitors who came to the house seeking a meal in exchange for performing some light duty chores. As a young child she vividly remembered one stranger who ate his meal alone on the porch; when she asked my grandfather why he would not eat with the family, my grandfather replied that he was simply too ashamed to do so. Those were desperate times that lacked today’s social safety nets, and folks had to make do. And so, they did, perhaps with some hubris that would have been harder to find just a decade earlier. Seems that kind of hubris is nowhere to be found today.

I think some of my frugality and creativity came from my mother and in turn, from her childhood experiences during that era. She was crafty, not afraid of hard work, good with her hands, and as a child she grew up in times where you had to Make Do. Even in our comfortable suburban setting during the 60’s and 70’s she controlled our household finances frugally. Lots of clothes were handed down, socks were darned, coupons were clipped, vegetable gardens were grown, chairs were reupholstered, and nothing went to waste. Things were recycled before there was even a word for it. Old habits may die hard, but they can also be passed forward a generation or two.

As a kid I always had a creative mind and liked to build things. I progressed from Lego, to Meccano, to woodworking, to electronics, to vehicles, and eventually I learned how to build and repair all kinds of stuff. In that process I learned a lot about how things worked and how they were put together. One of my first upcycling projects was something I built while in high school. In the late 70’s “ghetto blasters” became popular, and kids would bring them to school and play tunes during lunch break and spares. But I decided to build one myself by repurposing a car stereo system.

I used two 3-way 6×9 speakers with massive 28 oz magnets, a radio-cassette deck, a 12V motorcycle battery, and a 120V to 12V transformer with rectifier (to run it on A/C or to recharge the battery with the flip of a switch). It was all packed within a carefully designed and crafted wooden compartment complete with a sliding rack to hold cassette tapes, a retractable antenna, and a handle repurposed from a bathroom towel bar. It was massive, it was heavy (over 20 lbs.), and it was really, really LOUD. I became quite popular with my peers but rather unpopular with the school’s administration.

Clouds started forming on my economic horizon by the early 90’s. After I had accumulated a few years of earning and living on my own as a university graduate in a professional field, I had an epiphany. I did not have my father’s standard of living, and likely never would, and I needed to adapt. With an equivalent education and at an equivalent age, my father’s after-tax income went a lot farther than mine ever would. At 30 years of age he could buy a brand-new car for 3 months take-home pay and a 2400 square foot suburban house for 3 years take-home pay, and there was no provincial sales tax back then.

Contrasting those times with my own at 30 years of age and those cars and homes would cost almost double that, closer to 5½ months and 5½ years respectively. By 1991 the provincial sales tax (introduced in 1961) had already climbed from 3% to 8%, and then along came the Goods and Services Tax, which added another 7% of federal tax on top of the 8% provincial tax and it was applied to practically everything the common man needed to purchase except for basic groceries.

So, on top of higher income taxes, lower relative compensation, and higher costs, I was also faced with forking over 15% more of my hard earned “after-income-tax” money at the cash register. I was being forced to live well below my father’s means, while my own means continually diminished, all to finance an ever-expanding Canadian government “bloatocracy” that refused to live within ITS means. Enough was enough.



My journey away from traditional consumerism and towards viable alternatives thus became more entrenched. I became focused on getting a better bang for the buck while simultaneously sticking it to the taxman in any way possible. This meant legal tax avoidance was fair game, but not illegal tax evasion. Yet as an employee (wage slave), the income tax problem was not easily mitigated; there were a few well-known strategies, but the most effective ones were reserved for the self-employed. I knew I needed to start off with the consumption side of things, the “debit” side of the household leger, and avoid consumption taxes.

Luckily the government never conjured any feasible strategy to force consumption taxes onto the used goods market (except for used vehicles as they required re-registration). So, for most of my young adult life I relied almost exclusively on the used goods market for all my household needs, and I became very proficient at used goods procurement. Around the same time that the internet was starting to take off, I began developing an ever-growing social circle; meeting new people and establishing contacts who worked in many different occupations.

This networking allowed me to develop a small but effective list of like-minded people with diverse skills and expertise, many of whom were willing to barter, trade, or collaborate their skill sets on projects. The recent advent of e-mail allowed mass communication, and pre-www online bulletin board sites facilitated buying and selling used goods locally, over and above the traditional want ads in print media. These pursuits formed the groundwork for being able to meet most of my consumer needs at a significantly reduced cost, and without the extortive 15% taxation, plus there was the bonus of getting others to buy into the plan. This was the foundation of what I termed “Guerrilla Economics”.



While searching for and procuring used goods for most everything I needed, I sometimes came across the odd “unicorn”; something that was available for free or next to nothing. Beyond the hand-me-down old cars from my grandmother and uncle which I kept roadworthy long past their prime, once in a while I chanced upon a major item being discarded simply because one small component failed. “I wasn’t sure what broke exactly, so I just bought a new one” was a phrase I heard often. More often than not, for just a few bucks for parts and/or a small bit of time, I found myself with a perfectly working if slightly used washing machine, or dryer, or BBQ, or lawnmower, or more recently even a 42” flat screen LCD TV.

So, over the years I continued to develop and refine my approach. It eventually led to bigger and bigger projects, mostly in the home improvement category. Even as the projects grew in size, duration, and complexity, I managed to break them down into reasonable sized subtasks and always tried to push the boundary a little with respect to free-sourcing material. I figured, if I’m not paying myself for the labor component, why pay retail prices – or pay anything at all if possible, for the material components? And if I can actually add additional value to my residential property – value that also appreciates free of capital gains tax even when I sell, then why not try to eliminate the consumption taxes too?

It all part of the philosophy I call “the Art of Upcycling”. It’s not just about the money saved, or about the government robber-barons being denied. It’s also about the challenge, the adventure, the struggles, the triumphs, and ultimately the satisfaction and pride of a job well done along a journey of slowly but deliberately turning one man’s trash into another man’s treasure. In these unprecedented times, when the government devil is actually doling out billions in fabricated/confiscated currency to enable idle hands to remain idle, the strength and security of self-reliance needs to be nurtured and grown in defiance, less it ceases to be. As their empire slowly fails due to their own regressive policies and incompetence, your own micro empire of self-reliance and diversified skills can slowly grow and flourish.



These two skill sets – learning how to source and procure used or free goods, and learning how to build, repair and upcycle things, will be very important to have if, or when, the Greater Depression materializes. A third skill – how to eliminate debt while growing and protecting financial assets, is also a critical skill to acquire – preferably before the Greater Depression materializes. But learning proficiency in the first two skills also allows the “upcycling” of “freed” capital that can be deployed towards developing that third skill! That process of redeploying freed capital is also part of the Art of Upcycling and Guerilla Economics. There is no point in saving a little, or a lot, of earned money unless there is better purpose by investing or deploying it elsewhere, far away from the extortive force of consumption taxes or from the grasp of Big Retail who only wants you to consume, dispose, and then consume even more.

So, fire away with the comments! Do you have a project big or small you wish to tackle? Would you like to know tips and tricks for free-sourcing or free-cycling? How to fix things worth fixing but determining when to pass? What about a top 20 “lessons learned” list developed from decades of experience? Or another article with details about how I tackled one of my bigger projects? This is a great community of fine folks here on TBP who I think value independence, individualism, freedom of speech, and exchange of ideas. So, any and all comments, even negative ones, are welcomed. I’ll endeavor to answer any questions you post to the best of my abilities.

Click to visit the TBP Store for Great TBP Merchandise