FREE!

Welcome, fiscally-challenged reader, as in this bonus blog we give you practical tips on how to live your life (or at least, furnish your home and entertain your kids) for absolutely nothing. In short, it's easy: move to the Bay Area and wander around a bit.

How is this possible you say? Well, Californians generally like to think they're good at recycling and care about the environment (although there are still many things that go on here which would be considered environmental madness in most of Europe: excessive car usage with almost no structural incentives to leave the car at home as parking is considered a basic human right, very little control on the usage of water despite repeated and highly damaging droughts), and it must be said that our recyclables collection here goes out much more often than the regular rubbish (aka trash) bin. But recycling large items seems to be a challenge: over in the UK you'd take these to a civil amenities site (aka "the dump"), or even donate them to charity, and they'd take care of those things for you. Seemingly not here.

Here, what you do is you put those items out on the verge, with a sign on saying "FREE!" in large, friendly letters. And no matter how naff or knackered, you'll unfailingly see those items disappear relatively soon. Case in point: this seen-better-days sofa was here a week ago, but is now gone:

Over our time here, we've seen all sorts of things recycled like this. Often it's furniture: half-dead sofas are a favourite, as are dining chairs and chests of drawers, but books are fairly common too, as are printers (and regular readers will wonder if I'm getting ideas there), and once we even saw what appeared to be the compressor piece of a paint sprayer.

The question in my mind is: who actually takes this stuff? Obviously everyone here owns a massive truck, so transport isn't an issue, but it's not clear to me who, in the second most expensive zip code in the US, wants a sofa that looks like the one above. I can only imagine there are some mysterious womble-like creatures living here somewhere that I've yet to meet.

Of course, it's also quite quaint and twee to see these free things, and the magpie in all of us has difficulty resisting bargains. I'm sure it's also a nice way to recycle items that are no longer needed as your kids grow up. Part of me is also reminded that this doesn't work in the UK because of the weather: anything left outside for more than 24 hours is going to get wet, potentially very wet.

I obviously like to practice fiscal prudence, so if you come to visit us here in the US, don't expect nice furniture or beds. Our house was furnished with surprisingly little expenditure, if you know what I mean, and, based on the photo above, who needs cushions on their sofa anyway?