maybe its a canadian thing...

When I was in Bristol the previous Canadian interns and I shared a reputation for being thrifty and resourceful in financial matters... perhaps this is less related to some sort of common 'candianness' and more attributable to the fact that one Canadian dollar is worth about half a pound, and so we become so thrifty out of necessity.

In Bristol I picked up the Canadian tradition of 'skip diving' (a skip is a dumpster)... now before you get all worked up with images of me scrounging through dumpsters, I'll let you know that its more of a metaphor than a literal description. My more frequent readers may remember the incident of the "vanity come desk" which I found curbside and quickly found a home for in my room.... a few days later I gleefully found its missing drawers in the same place I had found the initial vanity.

Well it seems that my knack for good freebie finds is just as strong in Brighton, as I picked up a couple of things for the house last night.

In our house we have had the problem of being sofaless or almost a month now. All the while we have discussed various date and times that we could go to 'shabitat' a charity shop/used furnishing store but we had much difficulty trying to coordinate this group outing. A few weeks ago we set aside that we would go to shabitat today (Monday), and so it would seem that our hopes of free furniture were coming to an end and that we would really have to buy one.

or so we thought...

Last night as I was walking Liz back to the station, just seven doors up the street from my house was a couch and chair sitting with signs saying 'free to a good home'... within minutes I rounded up some housemates and we carried the items in the house. What luck! and only the night before we were about to go out together to buy them.

When the girl housemates came home they were quite impressed with the sofa (it folds out into a foam mattress for people thinking of staying over), but weren't to thrilled about the chair given its office like qualities, and the fact that it had some paint stains on it. You see, the previous owners were in the middle of a DIY project and used it to stand on while painting before putting it out in the street.

Determined to make good use of the free chair, I gave myself a monday afternoon project - I picked up some clearance fabric and decided to give our chair a make-over.

See the results below...



the before and after!

It would seem that Canadian thrifyness has prevailed yet again. In fact, earlier I spotted a nice spinning office chair outside the same house, so I might sneak up the road to have a look at it, as I could give it a home in my room.

- C