I discovered at the weekend that you don’t have to buy from eBay to get your hands on recycled furniture. You can actually buy recycled new.
On a trip to Braintree to buy a new mattress for the spare bed (the last one got thrown out after eight years’ use and a further year of being slept on by my tenants) I dropped into a furniture store on the off-chance it was selling anything that might be right for the house.
My expectations were low: I’ve spent the last few weekends looking at furniture and the suitable items are few and far between.
And yet there in the foyer was just the thing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was clearly what I’d been after all along.
A table, four chairs and a bench, all made from reclaimed teak. On a fairly good offer, and ready for delivery in a month or so when the house will hopefully be in some kind of order. The chairs were comfortable, the table just the right size, and the bench could be swapped for another two seats for a premium of just £50.
What really appealed, though, was the wood. Teak is a hardwood, and as such it’s slow to grow and you shouldn’t really go chopping it down. Using reclaimed teak, though, gets around that issue, and as a bonus you end up with a wonderfully irregular and slightly worn piece of furniture. The colours are slightly random, and there are a few little bumps here and there, all of which add to the character.
It wasn’t cheap, so buying reclaimed wood clearly fails on one half of the blagger charter (low-cost living), but as it didn’t cost any trees their lives it has green credentials by the bucketload.
And here it is:
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