Let’s face it – having a boring dorm room, suite or apartment does not make a living space inviting. Most people may think the automatic choice to decorate a space is to go on Amazon and look for band posters and silly tapestries to hang up, or to go to the Five Below on Smithfield Street to find much of the same.
While this isn’t a bad choice, there is a better – and much cheaper – choice waiting for people to visit in the east side neighborhood of Point Breeze.
Enter Creative Reuse, or the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse if specifics are necessary.
Tucked away inside the same former warehouse that holds Construction Junction, Creative Reuse is a nonprofit organization that encourages artistic expression through the reuse of various materials. This can include making pieces with materials from the store, using materials as originally intended or using them as decorations.
Many of the items at Creative Reuse thankfully work great as decorations or already serve that purpose. It’s possible to find the occasional poster or large art board, but it’s way easier to find tons of stickers, random cut-out papers or fridge magnets, of which there are hundreds available.
For instance, there are entire bins full of random art prints, newspaper clippings and whatever else is donated to the store. This can include sewing guides, an architecture student’s drawings from the 1980s or an entire yearbook from the 1950s.
Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not only are stickers and fridge magnets also plentiful, but there are more CDs, VHS tapes and vinyl records available to pick through than one could reasonably look through in less than 10 hours.
How does any of this fit into decorating your campus living space? Anything can be a decoration if you want it to be, and Creative Reuse lets this happen easily.
Is there anywhere else in Pittsburgh where you can buy 20 magnets, 10 stickers, a pound’s worth of art prints and newspaper clippings and 45 cassette tapes all for less than $15? Likely not. It would be difficult to find a place like this anywhere else in the country.
And when all these items are ridiculously cheap, that means the barrier to entry for turning a dorm, suite or apartment into a livable scrapbook is next to none. For example, CDs flipped upside down to show the reflective side make for fun wall decorations that, for lack of a better term, look interesting. Pair this wall of reflective CD’s with some colorful lights and now you got a room that looks less boring.
Paint cassette tapes, cover the entire refrigerator in a Boulevard Apartment with old magnets, or hang up random pictures not taken by anybody in the room. It all costs much less than buying even just two large posters on Amazon.
For those who don’t have any ideas, Creative Reuse has an entire section of art created with materials from the shop for inspiration. Even if you just simply want to cover your walls without delving into the arts-and-crafts of reuse, the room is still fun to look at.
To get to Creative Reuse from campus with a U-pass, take the P1 East Busway bus and get off at Homewood Station. Afterward, take a right after leaving the station until reaching the corner of Thomas Boulevard and North Homewood Avenue. Then, take a left onto Thomas Boulevard and Creative Reuse will be directly ahead at 214 N Lexington St.
