“Do what you want to do today, because you never know what tomorrow might bring…”
How I Furnished my Flat for Free* (Part 2)
Hi ya, we may have a arm chair on offer of you’re still looking? Will need to get it out of the shed and have a look but you’re welcome to it if it’s any good?
Hi, don’t know if these are any good to you but I have:
Nest of tables - dark wood colour with class top,
A display unit/sideboard type thing - dark wood
I have large comfortable wobbly chair and a dining room table if you want them?
hi was wondering if you still need anything for your flat? i have a 3 seater sofa and matching chair in great condition hardly used at all as its been in a spare room..i have cups and plates and cutlery if it would help you?
In just a few days I reckon I could have furnished the lounge twice. Or had enough chairs to fill a village hall; just on the replies we received from Freecycle and Freegle.
Colleagues and friends at work too. Once word got out it spread like wild fire. Everyone was secretly looking for an excuse to get rid of the things that had been collecting dust in their sheds, lofts and garages.
All of this would have all been made slightly easier if I owned a van… so I was limited to what I could fit into my Saxo.
*Small confession we did spend some money - £40 on 2 bedside cabinets and a chest of drawers from our local community furniture project. A brilliant scheme to not only recycle people’s unwanted furniture but also helps train people in furniture repair, volunteering opportunities, and provides a cost effective solution for furniture to those who need it: if you’re in receipt of benefits, on a low income or a pensioner you get the goods at a fraction of the price!
A few tester pots of paint and we were able to ‘up-cycle’ our new furniture from this:
To this:
For a few days I slept on the floor, with the arrival of a bed frame (kindly donated by one of my wonderful colleagues) I needed a mattress - sleeping on the floor next to a bed frame just isn’t cricket.
Another friend at work mentioned he was about to throw a mattress out… I saved it. Now I know what you’re thinking “Eww, second hand mattress…hope there’s no map of Africa stain on it… “ Fortunately there was nothing of the sort. Unfortunately it was a similar age to myself and it’s comfort rating was not too dissimilar to the floor. Also being a king size mattress on a double be frame meant it overlapped a bit! But it did the trick. Gave me chance to figure out the best/cheapest place to purchase my very own mattress. A few weeks later I had haggled at the Dreams clearance store to get a nice mattress, delivered and the old one taken away, all for a reasonable cost, perfect.
No more floor bed!
In essence, furnishing your flat for free is fairly easy. Then when it comes to moving, you can either take it with you or put it all back on Freecycle guilt free that you’re not throwing away your money and helping to save the planet all at the same time.
How I Furnished my Flat for Free*
I like a challenge. If moving into a new flat wasn’t enough my flatmate and I decided that we would see if we could furnish it without spending a penny… and so began:
The Freecycle Challenge
For those of you who don’t know Freecycle and Freegle are both websites enabling people to give and get stuff for free. An entirely nonprofit initiative to get people reusing things and prevent good stuff clogging up our landfills. Even the classifieds site Gumtree has a ‘Freebies’ section to it.
We owned the bare essentials coming out of university, a set of cutlery each, 1 colander and a faded yellow toaster that cost 50p from a car boot sale 3 years ago. That was about it - oh and a Mexican rug and a trunk that is slowly being covered in stickers.
On our first night we ate Chinese takeaway on the lounge floor, then slept a couple of nights on our respective floors in our new rooms. I love adventure and getting back to basics… it was like camping but in my own flat. I loved it!
Alas, sleeping on the floor and shift work in a role of moderate responsibility are not conducive to healthy living or career prospects. We mentioned our plan to friends, family and got the word out at work too. Follow that with a little post online and we were off…
The responses we got were a little overwhelming!
TBC…
I need a new sofa. Or an old sofa. Or just any sofa….
Here’s an excellent way of getting both an adventure and a sofa.
Does anyone have a sofa they no longer need or want?
Here’s the blurb from the video because I loved it:
We were even told we should write a book, so I guess we are getting somewhere. No it is not for charity, no we are not training for something, it is a comment on the beige: why sit at home watching TV on your sofa when there is so much out there to experience? When you get back to the office and someone asks what you did over the weekend would you rather discuss the football, the series you watched on a huge television whilst simultaneously tweeting and facebooking from tablet and phone, making sure you never miss a beat of modern life, or would you rather tell the story of how you joined a group of friends, hooked into some seatbelts, and towed your Sofa across southern England? I choose the latter.
Music - Stornoway ‘We Are The Battery Human’
Elsewhere