When the government keeps you from going green.

I am a huge pack rat. I have such a hard time throwing away something that could be reused.

When I was a younger man I kept all sorts of odds-and-ends stored in boxes.

Old motors, resistors, capacitors, nuts, bolts, washers, wire string, unique items that I sometimes had no clue as to what it once was; but it all went into my boxes.

This was the reason that when I was 13 years old and my family moved I was required to carry all my own boxes. My dad told me that if I wanted all that junk I had to move it.

I have gotten a little better over the years.

One big help was that when I moved to St. Louis I had a 2001 Chevy Cavalier and could only take what I could fit in the car. That cut down my collection considerably, but it did not change my tendency toward reusing an item rather than discarding it.

Fast forward to the house on Stone Street.

We started remodeling this old house on Stone Street that had been built in 1948 and had not been changed much since.

The house had not been well maintained so there was a lot that had to be replaced. But because I still have the heart of a pack rat I tried to keep everything I thought I might be able to reuse.

The walls and ceilings were all plaster, so whenever plaster had to be removed I carefully separated the plaster from the lath (strips of wood). The crushed plaster was used to sure up the sugar sand path we call a driveway and the lath found use as kindling in our fireplace this past winter.

While working on the kitchen (STILL working on the kitchen) it became apparent that the adhesive on the wood floors was not going to come up, so I pulled the pine flooring out in favor of tile. However, even though the wood was no good for other interior application I just could not justify throwing all that perfect pine in the dumpster. So I kept it.

I stacked it all neatly on the side of the house, pulling pieces out as I needed them for various outdoor projects.

It was great. I saved money by not having to purchase wood for my various small projects around the yard and kept a few hundred pounds of lumber from ending up in the land fill.

That was, until this week.

It seems that despite the fact that I did my best to stack everything neatly and nicely on the side of the house, our favorite code inspector issued a warning that if the wood was not removed from the property by this Friday we would be issued a citation.

While I did manage to quickly build a compost bin to use up some of the wood, a majority of it was hauled off to the dump yesterday afternoon.

The thing that bothered me the most was that nearly every thing I tossed out of my truck bed to be buried in that landfill could have been used for something else. So much for Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

I just think it interesting that in a time where everywhere I turn there is some sort of initiative to get me to go more "green," but when I do find my own way of reducing my footprint on earth I have the City of Melbourne telling me to throw everything in the landfill.