Day: June 17, 2026

One thing I learned from my parents—and somehow managed to completely forget the moment I got my own credit card—was the art of reusing things.

Before I was born, my dad and grandfather built the house I grew up in. But they didn’t just go to a lumber yard; they literally tore down their old house to build the new one. It was the ultimate “DIY” project, though back then we just called it “being frugal.” My dad was decades ahead of the modern “fixer-upper” trend, just a lot more extreme and with much less HGTV theme music.

Fast forward to my high school years. Dad got the rights to tear down another old house just down the road. He handed me a wrecking bar and a sledgehammer, and for a while, I was the happiest kid in town. There is something incredibly exhilarating about being paid to be destructive. I spent that summer feeling like a one-man demolition crew. Watching those stubborn, over-engineered walls finally lose the battle and come crashing down from the second floor? Pure, unadulterated teenage joy.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end.

Once the house was a pile of lumber in our backyard, the “fun” part of the job was over. Dad looked at the mountain of wood and then looked at me. He suggested—and by “suggested,” I mean “ordered with the kind of authority that made groaning a strictly internal activity”—that I pull the nails out of every single board so we could reuse them.

Now, you have to understand: they built houses differently back then. These boards were twenty feet long and seemingly held together by a nail every quarter inch. My “destructive” summer turned into a “tedious” summer. I spent the rest of my vacation filling five-gallon buckets with rusty nails. It was the world’s slowest, most repetitive puzzle, but it certainly cured me of ever telling my dad I was “bored.”

Today, I live in a “throwaway” world. If something breaks, I don’t reach for a bucket of straightened nails; I reach for my phone and order a newer, better version. I’ve officially failed the “Reuse Everything” lesson.

So, the next time you’re feeling sad or bored because your tablet is charging or your phone is slow, just imagine your old Grumppa standing in the backyard, sweat dripping, pulling his ten-thousandth nail out of a piece of wood.

Suddenly, a slow Wi-Fi connection doesn’t seem so bad, does it?