Great Find!

 

This is our living room, or half of it. We enjoy a country style in our home (no surprise there), and even though it's a basement apartment, we have made it into a nice, cozy home. We love it there. It's only half-basement, because only one corner of the apartment is under ground. The rest is exposed. This is awesome, because we enjoy the comfort of a basement in that it never goes below 50 in the winter and stays nice and cool in the summer, but we also have a full back door and plenty of light. It's great. Brian is the mastermind behind our apartment's decoration and design. I can tell what goes together, but I can't position things in a room like he can. We're cheap (or "Thrifty", since cheap apparently denotes something negative), so we do most of the work ourselves. 

Brian and I are "Freegans"... I don't really know exactly what that means, but our friends consistently label us that way. Apparently there's a movement going on where people won't pay for any of their food. They dumpster dive, eat un-eaten food at restaurants, forage, and get food in any way besides pay for it. Brian was curious about it, so he found a "freegan test" online and took it, and ... drum roll please ... yep! We are officially freegans. Now, although I think free food is of course a great idea, I'm not willing to go as far as some people do. But we do get as much free food as we can, and our "freeganness" extends past food. 

We are always on the lookout for free anything. I think the biggest secret to finding good stuff free is to be willing to wait for it. Take our couch, for example. We had a little loveseat that we found at a thrift store that suited our situation sufficiently, but I hated it. It wasn't comfortable (Brian would definitely NOT agree with that statement), and it was ugly (Brian would agree with that statement). It was a terrible blue corduroy with other colors dispersed all over it. I tried to improve it by sewing a brown sheet over it, but that almost made it worse. We stuck with the sheet, however, because the blue didn't match a thing in the room. I could have gone to a lot of work to make a decent cover for it, but I didn't have any intention of keeping the thing very long, so I saw no reason to go to so much work. 

So we had that thing for a long while, until one beautiful day when we found the couch in the picture. I had just gotten off the bus at home, and Brian and I ran back to something I had seen only a few houses down the road. I had seen a fake leather couch with a huge, cozy chair to match. There was a sign on it, which I supposed would list a price, but to my amazement, the sign said "FREE"... music to my ears.  The chair was in perfect condition. We loaded it on top of our Subaru and Brian drove it home while I sat on the couch to keep our claim on it.

While I was waiting, I inspected the couch. It was great from the front, but the back was all torn out and ripped up. I ended up patching that up easily by tearing off some pieces from the back, patching the parts visible from the front and sides, and then I sewed a brown sheet (Yep, the same one that was on the loveseat) over the back so that it wasn't exposed. I wish I had some before and after photos. It looks great! We have it up against the wall, so you really can't tell anything was ever wrong with it. We love it!