ReadyMade for the handyperson inside us all

BERKELEY, Calif. — Ask Shoshana Berger what to do with a cigarette box, and she'll suggest decorating it with magazine pages and using it as a business-card holder. Orphaned fishhook earrings can hang ornaments on a Christmas tree. An abandoned Scrabble set turns into a bulletin board, with its letter tiles glued to thumbtacks.

Berger, 36, is the founder and editor-in-chief of ReadyMade Magazine, the do-it-yourself bible for the creative and frugal. When she looks at trash, she sees possibility.

Her predilection for tinkering started when she was a kid, watching her father — a mechanical engineer — working in her family's basement.

But Berger's interest really caught on when she lived for two years in a group of lofts in Oakland.

"Everyone had a project going at all times," she says, sitting in her apartment. "They were recovering their own floors, retiling their bathrooms, getting salvaged barn doors and putting them on tracks so that they could have rolling barn doors in their homes, making lamps out of busted vacuum cleaners. I thought what a great resource that would be if everyone submitted their projects and taught each other how to do things."

Berger's revelation turned into ReadyMade, which she launched with publisher Grace Hawthorne in 2001.

Published bimonthly, ReadyMade now has a staff of six and 100,000 readers and was nominated for the 2005 National Magazine Award in General Excellence for magazines of its size.

A related book — "ReadyMade: How To Make Almost Everything" (ClarksonPotter, $25) — is coming out in December.

New uses for old stuff

Berger lives by her do-it-yourself creed — her apartment is decorated with ReadyMade projects with a hunter lodge aesthetic. A faux antler rack hangs in her living room, lampshades made from cones of fire-resistant paper hang above her countertop and a bookcase made from drawers turned on their sides flanks her bedroom wall.

She has trained herself to be able to see unusual uses for just about any kind of disposable object — like, for example, the newspaper where you find this article.

"Papier-mache is the first thing that comes to mind," she says, when asked what readers can do once they've finished. You also can use your newspaper to make confetti, clean windows without leaving streaks, absorb bad odors, funnel spices or mulch a garden (it blocks weeds).

Berger has no love for packaging and waste that she says is "turning the Earth into a giant dump." But she said she's driven more by creativity than an extreme drive to recycle. She wants to help people "think differently about the stuff that surrounds them. To see the mundane beauty in everyday objects."

The long road to success

Berger's success is especially impressive when you hear some of her stumbling blocks, like her initial proposal, which she calls "a literary writer's attempt to pen a business plan."

Some industry experts said she'd never find a large enough market; others just didn't understand what she was trying to do.

"So, this is a joke, right?" Berger remembers the editor of Ladies' Home Journal saying when she showed her a copy of the magazine. "It's a funny thing to make people laugh?"

She describes ReadyMade as an "inventor's manual" with a "'50s handyman aesthetic" — whereas Martha Stewart represents "the ideal of domestic perfection." Named after the art movement started by Marcel Duchamp, it is less about whimsical ways to arrange tulips than it is about creative and practical uses for things that you already have.

"I wanted ReadyMade to be a democratic design manual," says Berger, "so that if you had a latent creative gene, you could pick it up and make something."

She's succeeded. When flipping through ReadyMade, it's hard not to feel like you can be a domestic version of MacGyver — a perception fueled by a regular feature, named after Richard Dean Anderson's 1980s do-it-yourself hero. "He had totally ingenious solutions for everyday life," says Berger. "It's like, 'I'm going to pick this lock with a paper clip and a piece of chewing gum.' "

But even Berger has her limits. Toilet-paper cozies, for example, should not be tolerated. And, while retired underwear can be used as cleaning rags or to stuff dog beds, you shouldn't push it too far. "You don't want to do too much with old underwear," Berger says, firmly. "It's kind of nasty."