usethings news

This is our new trivet. It flat-packs and is hand made in Castlemaine from plantation timber. We like to convert as much of the timber we get in to useful things. In docking the new batch of drying rack end frames and looking at the off-cuts we thought to use them for a simple trivet. This is […]

Looking at the coat rack packaging going out this morning I thought they looked a bit rough & ready. We use clean recycled cardboard—fruit boxes, anything at hand (Ikea boxes at the moment amusingly). This packaging is not slick, and not as considered as our coat rack packaging (jute string and recycled card: fully compostable) but they get the racks to

This August usethings will be ten years old. Over the next five months we’ll be celebrating, and looking back over the last ten years. Part of the celebrations will be discounts and give-aways: some for everyone, but the best for subscribers to our mailing list. Hit the subscribe button over on the lower left to

We’ve just got a new batch of recycled hardwood for our coat rack back-boards. It’s really clear Vic Ash, ex building timbers, a few nail holes and sap veins but very nice & mostly quarter sawn. It’s been beautifully machined straight and smooth here in Castlemaine and, given their age and close grain, these timbers

Interior design is another facet of usethings, conducted in harmony with our philosophy around good living and sustainability. We are excited to offer an expansion of these services in partnership with the architect Stephen Lumb. This capacity enables us to engage in whole buildings, integrating the total design of a home, office, or commercial space. We’ve worked with

We’ll be back to our regular opening times from tomorrow February the first onwards. Our times are: Friday 10:30 to 3:30, and Saturday from 10am to 1pm. We’ve had a few visitors in January and are always happy to open up other times if you are in town.

We designed and made counter display shelves for RedBeardBakery in Trentham  as part of an  ongoing relationship. We’ve worked on their interior, displays, and cafe over the years… we also make traditional bakery peels for them, sourcing recycled Kauri for the handles and supplying the heads as they wear out. These counter display shelves are welded

We’ll be taking it easy from now through January. Our Castlemaine store won’t be open the regular hours, but call if you want to have a look, we may be near-by and can meet you there even at short notice. Happy to open up for a browse or chat. Our online store will continue to

We’re re-stocking our usual lines and adding two new products at the moment. It’s not often we find items that meet our expectations, and  become a usethings other maker product. We’ll be introducing two new useful things from companies that have been around since the 19 century …  good things just keep being valid, even

Congratulations To Donna who won the “Make It Wood” drying rack at Grand Designs Live in Sydney recently. Her rack was  dispatched early this week. We are proud to be associated with Planet Arc’s Make It Wood campaign and our drying rack sits well with these ideas, being made from plantation sugar gum, a fast

Our laser cut plywood stool, the Alien, features at the Hub as part of the Melbourne Festival. 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 side by side inverted, and the seat

The return of our laser-cut plywood stool. This supper-eficient design has been languishing with production issues to resolve, but a recent order of Aliens from Bluebottle catalysed a design evolution – Alien 4. They will be used at The Hub in the Melbourne Festival. We’ve stripped Alien 4 back to the core strengths of the

As part of our current exhibition in collaboration with Vanessa Lucas for Craft Cubed, we’ve just installed an exhibition in the window of Clementines, 7 Degraves St Melbourne, featuring our 600 x 600mm All-ply table and Vanessa’s porcelain. Clementines is a great store featuring all Victorian products and produce. drop by if you are in

We’ve recently completed a few interesting sizes of our All-ply table design and it has worked surprisingly well. There is the 600 x 600 made for our Craft Cubed exhibition – it’ll be in the window at Clementines 7 Degraves Street Melbourne CBD from the 17th till the end of August . Then there is the

In refreshing the store for our Craft Cubed Exhibition we brought it one of Greg Stirling’s beautifully hand crafted Windsor chairs – a Lobster Pot. We are interested in a re-evaluation of these traditional chairs from a contemporary design perspective. The Windsor chair is an evolved design using local (in its place of origin) materials

As part of Craft Cubed 2013 we have collaborated with  Vanessa Lucas on an interior scenario featuring Vanessa’s new tableware designs in cream porcelain and our all-ply table. The exhibition will be in place from the 4th of August and open our usual hours – Fridays from 10:30 to 3:30 and Saturdays 10 to 2. The exhibition

We’ve just had news that our plantation sugar gum rods will be machined next week so we are now taking orders again from our online store. We’ll contact those who emailed us to go on the waiting list and fill those orders first. Apologies for the delay, our sales have doubled each year so we

Unfortunately we have run out of the plantation sugar gum rods we use in our drying rack, a bit of bad timing on our part as it takes a few weeks to get them from the timber co-op to the dowel machinists. We’ve just about doubled sales this year and so are having trouble keeping

We sent up a coat rack and drying rack to Brad at Skarfe in Sydney and he’s used them in his store display. Check them out at  4C Roslyn Street Potts Point or on Facebook.

The pulleys turned up today so we are filling orders again, sorry for the delay for those who had placed orders, we should be caught up with dispatches tomorrow. These are smooth running stainless steel and acetyl, bearing-less pulleys made for sail boat rigging, so are well within their load capacity. Not being exposed to

After a bit of prototyping and testing we are finally ready to launch our Mud Mat. Hand made from plantation sugar gum production offcuts, this door mat is extremely durable and weather resistant. Designed to flex and shed mud and dirt from your boots before you go inside. We’ve had the idea for ages but

Some of our early prototype coat racks from 2004 are still in service around our place. This one was relegated to garden tool storage on the outside of an old shed, but it’s coping with the weather and punishment of storing heavy tools. We love physical joins – the pegs fit into a deep socket

People often get our name mixed up, we get ‘used things’ quite a lot… they come up the steps to our Castlemaine store looking for antiques! usethings is a translation of brugsting we came across it in this passage from the book  “300 Years of Industrial Design” by Adrian Heath, Ditte Heath, and Aage Lund

New usethings product for this coming winter… more details soon…

We recently installed one of our coat racks at the Australian National Academy of Music in South Melbourne. This office and rehearsal space refit was designed by Bluebottle and project managed by Debbie Taylor of usethings… its not what you know… Bluebottle also used a lit version of our coat rack with a ply backing board

See the process in pictures; how to assemble usethings drying rack from the kit and install it in your home. One of our recent drying rack owners kindly allowed us to photograph the installation of their drying rack. Hit this link: drying rack installation slide show.

We recently sent two Nosey Parkas to Rick in Melbourne and he replied, “Nosey Parkas in position and making me smile” and sent us this image.

The fathom is a measurement of length derived from the distance between outstretched arms. In our drying racks we supply 8 fathoms of cord, about 14m.  A fathom is an eminently sensible measure for rope and cord, as that is how you lay it off a roll or coil of rope; the action and the

This is the date palm weaving from Morocco that is part of a long tradition of creating practical hard wearing carriers. These baskets are used, among other things, for hauling construction materials on donkeys so are extremely tough. We couldn’t find a local equivalent for a sustainable hard wearing basket so these French market baskets

We’ve just had another enquiry about shipping our drying racks to New Zealand. We do, and it costs AU$100, so the total with the kit is AU$380 and it takes 4 to 8 days. It seems The Block has just aired in NZ. Brad and Lara used our drying rack in the laundry of their

Hi – just wanted to thank you for the fabulous drying rack kit (and the other items). My rack is now installed in my garage and I don’t think I will need to use the clothes dryer except for emergencies.  It reminds me of growing up with mum drying the daily wash for a family

New for us is the flat rate shipping / delivery charge – the price of delivery is included in the price of each useful thing we offer. This is great value for our regional customers (being regional ourselves), some of the delivery costs are over half of what we used to charge under the location

We just got a new load of plantation sugar gum for the end frames of our drying rack. Now, 14 holes per end frame and 234 end frames… thats 3276 holes to drill! We worked with Smartimbers to use off-cuts from their processes, we only need short and narrow pieces for the end frames. The

We’ve set up a mobile website so if you access usethings.com.au from a smartphone or mobile device you will be automatically redirected to our mobile site. All our pages, weblog, and online store are available, only pared back for the small screen. I can see why they say to make your mobile site first –

Work on our new website continues. We’ve been updating images and adding more products to the online store. These are items – useful things by other makers, that we stock in our physical store in Castlemaine and now offer to all of Australia. In telling their stories online it helps express what usethings is about.

usethings store will open tomorrow. We’ll be back to our usual trading times: Friday 10:30 to 3:30, and Saturday from 10am to 2pm. Call for times outside these hours, we can often open up even at short notice.

At last it’s here – usethings new website and online store. It’s been a long process that required a rethink how we express our business and getting up to speed with online trading. Any feedback would be welcome – I’m sure there’ll be things to iron out. Technically it is a better platform – the

aaaaaahhhhhh!

We’ve had 100% Greenpower for our home and business for many years now with Origin 100% wind power. Now there have been concerns about Origin but we’ve stuck with them more for the trouble it takes to change than anything, but their position on reducing the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target is unacceptable. So we’ve ditched

Our 38cm (15″) round bamboo cutting board is back in stock… being a small maker we walk a fine line between stock and made-to-order. We try to keep our designs available but if we are out of stock, order and we’ll get it together.

Nosey Parka noses made from sugar gum drying rack off-cuts.

Carolyn has used two rows of our coat rack – hats above and coats below. We like it!

We are prototyping a new shelving system in our store refit. Here it is glued-up in the workshop featuring a Spanish Windlass… it’s what I do when I don’t have a clamp long enough, a very handy and flexible clamp at any scale.

Originally published on Castlemaine Independent Another study explores how bad sitting is for you. This US study looks at sedentary work and  watching TV and quantifies the risks of reduced lifespan. Article focus: This paper presents the results of an analysis aimed at determining the effects of sedentary behaviour on life expectancy in the USA. Key

Some images from the redesign of the café, by usethings Debbie Taylor in collaboration with RedBeard.  

A commission by Bluebottle for their construction / lighting design Quartetthaus: a performance in the Melbourne Festival – our coat rack on a ply backboard with a spacer  for  concealed lighting. “The Australian National Academy of Music and Bluebottle have teamed up to create Quartetthaus, a beautiful intimate space, purpose-built to enable 52 patrons at

usethings All-ply table and some Alien stools are at Footprints, an exhibition of 16 central Victorian printmakers in the Counihan Gallery Brunswick form the 2nd September to 2nd October 2011. 233 Sydney Road, Brunswick, VIC 3056 Open Wed – Sat 11 am – 5 pm, Sun 1 pm – 5 pm

Our store table has gone to the Footprints Exhibition in the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick for a month so we’ve brought in an experiment… a prototype all-ply table with a linoleum top. Table finishes are tricky – we want timber but timber moves, marks, and stains. We use ply so the movement is minimal, but