Eco Lesbo Vego

Reuse: Second-hand furniture

January 28, 2009 at 12:04 am 4 comments

I love a good bit of second-hand furniture. My boss (sorta) does too – she collects antiques. She loves them for their beauty and history.

I don’t collect antiques, but I do buy second-hand furniture – partly (and originally) because it’s considerably cheaper, and I have never been a wealthy person. These days though, the low impact nature of using pre-loved furnishings is the main reason I do it.

Second-hand furniture - For the Win!

Reusing furniture is great for the environment. When using pre-loved furniture, you avoid pollution from the following sources:

• Deforestation, water use and land use to make wooden furniture
• Chemicals/smog, drilling and mining from making plastic furniture
• Strip mining to get the metal to make metal furniture
• Quarrying to get rock and sand for stone and glass furniture
• Water and land use for plant-based fabrics
• Water use, land use and pollution from animal-based fabrics
• Excess water use in any type of furniture production.

You can get second-hand furniture for free from Freecycle. Sometimes though, what you want isn’t there, so you have to go shopping. There are a bunch of different places you can go to find second-hand furniture.

Op shops (also known as thrift shops or consignment stores)
Op shops, like Lifeline, St Vinnies or the Salvation Army often have big stores which carry a variety of (mostly crappy) used furniture. If you wade through the crap though, you can usually find a gem hiding in a corner somewhere. I’ve gotten a desk chair, wicker phone table and a bedside table from op shops.

Second-hand furniture shops
Second-hand furniture shops tend to have stuff that is a bit nicer than op shops, but it’s also a bit more expensive. Look out particularly for the kind that sell ex-display home pieces. The furniture looks good, has been hardly used and is significantly cheaper than buying new! They’re located all over – you’ll just have to search for them. I’ve gotten a coffee table and my dining table and chairs from second-hand furniture shops.

TradingPost, Craigslist, TradeMe, ebay or similar sites/newspapers
Online and print classifieds listing items for sale, from computers to textbooks, not just furniture. That being said, you can get some really good deals here, and often from places close-by.

Garage sales, Skip Dipping (Dumpster Diving) and Kerbside Collections
Garage sales, like Freecycle give-aways, are an excellent local place to go to find second-hand furniture. As the furniture is fresh out of someone’s house, it’s usually in good nick ad you don’t have to pay the middle man. Kerbside collections occur here once every two years, during which time everyone puts their unwanted junk on the footpath. It’s perfectly acceptable to take stuff you see – we’ve gotten lamps and a fan. If you’re lucky, you live in Canberra and have Second-hand Sundays. Skip dipping or dumpster diving (often not actually involving diving) is another perfectly legitimate way to get good stuff. We got a big couch when we were living in the USA by doing just that (clearly it was too big to be actually in the dumpster, but it was beside it).

Friends, family and colleagues
Getting furniture from friends, family and colleagues is the best idea in my opinion. You know they’re not going to rip you off and normally their stuff is in good nick and you can trust it. I, for example, have two desks, two sets of drawers, two desk chairs, a microwave, a fridge, a washing machine, a bookshelf, some massive chests of drawers, lounge chairs galore and other bits and pieces from friends, family and colleagues. Some things I’ve bought and others I’ve been given. Most often, people offer when they’re emigrating out of the country, moving generally or just don’t have the space.

So give second-hand furniture a shot – save the environment and your wallet!

Entry filed under: Reuse. Tags: furniture, garage sales, low impact, op shopping, second-hand.