Any orders placed after today (11th Dec) will be made up and shipped in the new year. Happy holidays! We’re excited to be launching our first new product for a very long time in the new year… stay tuned.

Some of the components in our website dated back to the beginnings of usethings in 2004 so it was well overdue for modernisation! We’ve had expert help to fix it after botching a major update. Looks like everything is working but let us know if you find any glitches. As part of the process we’ve

Part apology for late orders, but Mushroom orders have gone from our usual 3 or 4 a year to over 90 so far. Awesome isolation mending going on, we hope it keeps up! Sorry for all the other late orders, hand turned mushrooms are time consuming. This has been one of our busiest periods —

This turning off-cut made a quick repair for a melted pot lid handle. New life for this twenty year old pot which is a favorite for cooking rice because of its great seal. Many more meals out to come of this — another twenty years! Now with a bit more time there are a few

We’ve got to admit there is truth in this, my background in traditional shipbuilding left a fascination for rigging and pulleys that comes through in our drying rack. Dear Tim, belatedly a photo of your lovely rack in place. Thank you. It all feels very nautical in the hallway now. Have you ever read the

Apologies for the delay and thanks for your patience. It took us a while to get the sleeves that cover the rods to protect clothes from tannin. We get these extruded and have to do at least a kilometer of them to make the setup worthwhile. We are now taking orders again.    

We’ve just delivered a counter for the foyer of the Castlemaine Library and Phee Broadway Theater. The design includes a hydraulically raised half with shelf for theater ticket sales, locking internal section and a deep fronted lower counter for wheelchair access. The whole thing is on industrial wheels for mobility, flexibility is the key with

Visible mending: punk’s not dead, just patching itself up Visible mending places clothing at the centre of a protest movement. Gaye Naismith Emily Brayshaw, University of Technology Sydney Visible mending is a quiet, global protest movement that’s happening at a grass-roots level, challenging the way we consume clothing. “We don’t need to throw our clothes

  Sometimes it all comes together. Here’s a photo of delivering a repaired Alien stool — an old usethings product sold locally about 9 years ago. First broken one we’ve come across. Delivery by bike, a 25+ year-old steel frame that has had numerous parts renewed in its long life. The Alien is an efficient

Our friends over at Brave New Eco sent us some fantastic images from one of their  projects that use our coat rack and drying rack. The bungalow up-cycle project is a 1950’s cream brick home in Melbourne’s North with a self contained granny-flat that had been built only 4 meters from the back of the

Our darning mushrooms are always a generous size compared to what is commonly available but this custom order is a monster 95mm diameter. Must be some big holes to mend! We make small items from production off-cuts to get the most out of the timber we use. This one is made from recycled and plantation

We made this 14 peg years ago and recently got this beautifully shot and styled photo from the customer with a request for another 14 peg. 12 peg 2m coat racks are the longest we can ship Australia-wide but for Central Victorian locals we can do 3m or over in a single length, depending on

Our coat rack can help reduce your environmental impact. From research for our drying rack we realised the impacts of washing and drying clothes: there is water, detergents and energy use of course, and now recently discovered is that the micro fibers shed during washing are ending up in our oceans. Do we need to

We’ve just reduced the price of the longer coat racks. The price-per-peg goes up slightly the longer the rack, as a decent long back-board is harder to come by than a shorter one. This pricing makes the shorter racks better value and uses up offcuts — part of our waste minimisation strategy. The pricing for

We finally have a timber solution and have switched our online store drying rack to in-stock so they are now available to order again. Apologies for the slow resolution of this. Our material selection ideals caused us to persist in a search for plantation sugar gum — our preferred sustainable timber. With no success in finding a supplier we

Our flat rate shipping makes it affordable to buy our products in remote areas of Australia. We get orders from stations and communities in far flung places. This rack was ordered with extra wide spacing for Akubra hats — it’s got our imagination going, would love to see it in use!

We’ve begun works at the popular Castlemaine Cafe Saffs in late December and over the Christmas closure. First was the counter area with a new counter top in hoop pine ply. Also rationalising behind the counter with storage, work surface and shelf. Plus a bit of painting and patching. Deb brings her catering experience into the design of

Recent delivery of an All-ply table to Stephen Lumb Architect new office in Castlemaine.

Recent installation of our Floating Shelf. Made from plantation Hoop Pine plywood (E0) and features our box design that hides the fixings.  

A give-away from Green Lifestyle Magazine, go to this page to enter: http://www.greenlifestylemag.com.au/win-a-usethings-drying-rack

Selling a lot of our darning mushrooms at the moment. One thing about repetition — if you pay attention there are things to learn. After making these for years I just came up with a new process for finishing the underside. This last one was the best I’ve made.

Here’s the latest All-ply table for clients in Castlemaine. Designed for the kids to draw on; the furniture linoleum will easily handle extreme conditions (kids + furniture). This one is 1800 x 600mm and features an open shelf underneath, and idea we will continue to develop.   I feel fortunate and happy to be living with one of

If you are having problems with the shipping part of our checkout  just email and we can process your order. We are in the process of reseting our online store for customer location based shipping rates. This will incorporate an Australia Post calculator for local and international deliveries of small items. The big stuff will still go by courier and

A powerful film about air pollution in China by Chai Jing.  

We’ve changed the design of our gumboot stand to make it more compact and also to use 16mm sugar gum dowels with rounded ends — offcuts from our drying rack production. The heavy recycled hardwood base for the 4 pair stand is 800mm long. Store / air / dry your gumboots on our weather proof rack,

John Reid from RedBeard, our baker-at-large, found Alians at the Summersalt Festival in Melbourne.

We are down at our favourite bakery RedBeard again. February is their time-out / maintenance period, and usehtings is assisting with a rejig and freshen up. Great to see how the major refit we did a couple of years ago is standing up. Part of this years work was designing and making a fly screen door for the high-traffic

This array of beautiful paper cranes at our store are by Una Mitchell, the colours fly in our light filled room.   summer light in planes from one dimension to three fly paper cranes

Drop by our showroom in Castlemaine to see our workstool. This design is the result of a years long research and prototyping process aimed at addressing the effects on our bodies of seated work. We explain more in the article “how to sit”. We’ve got one in the store now so try it out and we’ll

During January and February we’ll be away at various times so our showroom — usethings store in Castlemaine opening times will be erratic. We will be in town mostly so can open by appointment any day, call on 0405 564 206 to see if we are around and make a time. We will be filling

A special order for our friends at Redbeard Bakery.

usethings friends will know how seldom we introduce a new product. It’s our selection criteria, there aren’t many things out there that meet our expectations. We are excited today to receive our first order of hand made millet brooms from the Tumut Broom Factory, who have been making brooms in Australia since 1946. We love

The fun part of being a designer-maker: prototyping. This is a test of the jig and cold laminating hardwood. Timber is amazing in what it can do, here thin strips are glued together and clamped in a jig to form a curved piece that is part of a new design. Experience building ships and boats

We made up some special bamboo cutting boards for a long table meal featuring local food at The Village in Edinburgh Gardens, Fitzroy Melbourne recently. They where used to serve the lamb and impressed people at the meal so we thought we’d offer them up as a product; a handy compliment to our large round

Environmentally savvy Australian carpet company Above Left  recently redirected over 3000 square meters of carpet tile away from landfill with their rEcover program, which is designed to deal with carpet waste from office re-fits. This is a Product Stewardship program that they also apply to other makers products, i.e. taking back all brands of carpet not just their own. See

We recently completed a commissioned bed-base featuring Blackwood and recycled timbers. The bed was designed with the clients and has a neat base setup that gives it a floating look; handy for a big bed as it doesn’t overcrowd the room. The wing shelves attach to the base which further minimises the impact on floorspace. It’s designed in three parts which

Green Lifestyle Awards where announced last night in Sydney. Our clothes drying rack  got a highly commended in the home product category. See the other awards here. Pleased to see David Holmgren was inducted into the hall of fame, if you ever have a chance to hear him speak he has a powerful and inspiring holistic

Shots from the workshop

We use recycled building timbers for our coat rack, usually Vic Ash or Messmate, but we take any sound hardwood and reveal its beauty by machining it for the coat racks. Here are some of the colours and features in a recent batch of orders. These have been oiled and are photographed in shaded daylight;

Another project with our friends at bluebottle; they used our updated Work-stool and Aliens in this recent interior: bluebottle is a Melbourne based design company with expertise in combining light and form in inventive ways. The bluebottle team is accomplished in managing all aspects of a project to achieve an excellent outcome. Company members work across various

We’ve just signed the Castlemaine Divestment Action pledge, a charter focusing action on investment in carbon intensive industries. We have recently changed our electricity supplier to Powershop, the only retailer that doesn’t want the RET reduced or scrapped. For many years we’ve chosen banks based on their ethical position and currently bank with MECU. Supper is

The last rays of a beautiful day in Castlemaine. Thanks to all those who dropped by for drinks or sent messages. It was a lovely gathering: chilled Champaign, good conversation with our friends in the beautiful garden at No 8, even the kids found a ball and disappeared to play street soccer.

Come along to help us celebrate usethings tenth year, drinks at usethings store, 8 Templeton St Castlemaine from 5 to 6pm tomorrow Friday 29th.

We’ve recently up-dated our Work-stool and written more on the design and ergonomics of sitting, see our how to sit page. The new version features a fine stainless steel leg brace to ensure the Work-stools long life. In our how to sit page we better describe and illustrate the design of this stool and how it

Simon in Melbourne installed a couple of our racks; he had a hard time fixing to a hard plastered masonry wall which is pretty tricky. Simon sent us this great image. “ …I put them up on the weekend – look great, extremely happy with outcome but had to use some additional fixings as the hard plastered

Homes + featured our coat racks in a shoot for their page 12 DIY ideas.

New images for our darning mushroom, get those repairs done now while the winter inspiration is there! Hand turned in Castlemaine and made from plantation Sugar-gum. Features a needle store in the hollow handle.

We’ve been getting a lot of social media interest in our laser cut plywood flat-pack stool so we thought we’d repost about them. Our Alien stool is designed for efficient use of materials; ten Aliens come from one standard sheet of plywood. This is achieved by the careful geometry of the ‘nested’ parts—leg sections sit

“Just a word of thanks for the clothes rack which Tim installed for us in Maldon recently. During these cold wet days it must have saved us many dollars, and the country a small amount of carbon emmissions in power not used on a dryer. It truly works brilliantly using all that spare heat near

To celebrate the decade usethings has been making and selling useful things, we are offering prizes to our past customers. We send out our products and often wonder what sort of life they have in their new homes. We’d love to see or hear about your usethings installation. There are two prizes, one for the

In the workshop today: images of a 4m / 24 peg coat rack (pictured un-oiled), this one is Vic Ash. It’s made from two 2m lengths as it is going to Sydney and 2m is the maximum our courier will carry. The close-up below shows the butt join and we’ve carefully matched the grain in the two

We’ve got a new Greg Stirling piece in our Castlemaine store. This is a three seat settee in Ash with a beautiful blackened finish. If you haven’t tried sitting in one of Greg’s chairs drop by and get a feel for the comfort of sitting in a hand crafted chair.

Despite the grey weather we had quite a few visitors to our castlemaine store today. After many requests we’ll be offering our hanging jar displays for sale, made from an old Fowlers jar, hemp rope and a plywood hook. We finally found a supply of good hemp rope which is not easy to come by.

We don’t add a new product from other makers very often, there are few things that resonate with usethings ideals — beautiful and useful things. So this one caught or attention recently, a simple device to extend worn-down pencils so you can keep using them till the last, much much better than throwing them out