The human womble: From oven to sideboards (and everything in between), how one woman furnished her home FREE with other people's rubbish
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Sipping tea in her homely kitchen, Cat
Fletcher is talking about her latest acquisition. ‘The chair you’re sitting on —
that came from a skip outside a posh restaurant in Brighton. I picked it up just
before Christmas,’ she announces cheerfully.
I’m tempted to move to another seat — just in
case it’s a bit, you know, mouldy. But I have to admit it’s a handsome affair.
Upholstered in black velvet and fake leopard-skin, it looks almost new: the only
difference between this chair and one you’d find in a smart furniture shop is
that it didn’t cost Cat a penny.
The same can be said for pretty much
everything else she owns. As the Mail revealed last week, the 49-year-old
mother-of-three has furnished her three-bedroom semi in Newhaven, East Sussex,
almost entirely from stuff that might otherwise have ended up in landfill,
saving her an estimated £20,000.
Her efforts have saved her an estimated £20,000. Her
household items were all discarded on the street, hauled out of a skip or given
away by people who didn't want them any more
Thrifty: Cat Fletcher in her kitchen. The 49-year-old has
furnished her three-bedroom semi almost entirely from stuff that might otherwise
have ended up in a landfill
Her cooker and fridge, tables, wardrobes,
chairs and sofas, storage units, lampshades, pots and pans, plants and vases —
all of them were discarded on the street, hauled out of a skip or given away by
people who didn’t want them any more.
Even this year’s Christmas tree came free: ‘It
was brand new, still in its box, and had been taken to the local tip,’ Cat
reveals. ‘I’m quite friendly with the people there, so they let me have it. It’s
astonishing what people throw away. Usually there’s nothing wrong with any of
it. And I’m not judging — we’re human, and we like to change things round.
‘But why waste the stuff that’s being thrown
out? Someone can always put it to good use.’
Of course, the Wombles were onto this some
time ago, while the concept of ‘make do and mend’ is hardly unfamiliar to anyone
who grew up in the post-war era. But the frenzy surrounding the January sales
suggests it’s not at the forefront of most people’s minds. For all the current
talk of austerity, rampant consumerism is all too often the order of the
day.
Not for Cat, though. Instead, she is leading
something of a one-woman crusade against waste — although she insists she’s a
realist. ‘I’m not a lentil-eating, macramé-knitting hippy,’ she says. ‘I just
think we dispose of things too quickly.’
Work bonus: This comfy red armchair was a donation from
her old boss and would cost around £300 new
Among the items Miss Fletcher has found for free are Le
Creuset pans, left, and an ornamental duck, right. her make-do and mend attitude
came in useful when she was made redundant from her job as a PA
It’s hard to disagree when you take a tour
round her home and see what people were willing to throw away. Take the six-ring
steel oven, which would cost around £1,000 new.
‘My old landlord was overhauling his kitchen
and was just going to bin the entire thing,’ she says.
‘Then there’s the Daewoo fridge, which had
been installed in a newly renovated kitchen by a builder friend. The owner
didn’t like it and asked the builder to get rid of it, so he gave it to me.’
In the living room, a glossy black chest of
drawers from Habitat — which would cost around £900 new — and matching coffee
table were the result of an encounter with some foreign language students who
were returning to Spain and clearing out their home. ‘They were fly-tipping
really. So I took them off their hands.’
A giant comfy red armchair — new it would cost
around £300 — was a donation from her old boss, the carpet is made up from
off-cuts, the lamps and shade were all salvaged from skips, while the damask
curtains, bookcases and shelving units — including a splendid piece in walnut
and glass — came courtesy of Freegle, a website where people give away their
unwanted items.
Her trendy purple kitchen chairs were the
result of a swap with a friend who wanted rid of them and had taken a shine to
some wooden chairs Cat had hauled out of a skip and tarted up. ‘I look in skips
the whole time — there’s no shame in it.’
Of course, not all of Cat’s finds are in mint
condition; nor is her house likely to feature in a designer interiors magazine
any time soon — but that’s hardly her primary concern.
‘You have to be realistic. Sometimes you get
lucky, sometimes things want patching up,’ she says. ‘A lot of it is snobbery.
People don’t have a problem buying antiques, do they?’
Inside and out: A sofa Miss Fletcher recovered from a tip
near her home in Newhaven, East Sussex
Given her lack of materialism, it’s a surprise
to discover that Cat enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class upbringing.
Australian-born, her mother was a nurse while her father was a professional
yachtsman. ‘We didn’t want for anything,’ she says.
Her late mother, in fact, was something of an
avid consumer. ‘She was a shopaholic really — she liked the latest of
everything, which is quite funny now I think about it,’ Cat says. ‘Dad was much
more frugal, so I reckon I must take after him.’
After studying fine arts at university Cat
worked as a psychiatric nurse before, in 1990, meeting her British husband Gary,
a building contractor and the father of her three children — Sirus, 21, and
19-year-old twins India and Ruby. She travelled with him to England and the
couple settled in Brighton before divorcing five years ago, although they remain
firm friends.
As a young parent Cat says she was
instinctively thrifty. ‘I’ve always been a fixer-upper. I re-upholstered old
furniture, and I made a lot of my kids’ clothes, or I’d buy stuff from charity
shops and “up-cycle” them by altering them. I think my husband’s friends thought
I was a bit eccentric — if they were getting rid of anything they’d always offer
it to me first. We weren’t rolling in money, so it helped, but I’d have done it
anyway — I’ve never liked waste.’
This make-do-and-mend instinct proved useful
when, two years ago, Cat was made redundant from her job as a PA. ‘I only
received £71 a week in benefits. That’s barely enough to cover bills, never mind
feed the family,’ she says. ‘I had to be imaginative.’
She can barely remember the last time she
bought an item of clothing new. ‘This was new — in 1997,’ she says, tugging at
her dress. ‘The rest of what I’m wearing came from charity shops.’
In fact, even now Cat has a new, albeit
temporary job as a researcher on an arts project for Brighton University
(fittingly, she is helping to oversee a project in which a house will be built
entirely out of waste), she is continually astonished by people’s cavalier
attitude to their possessions. ‘I’m shocked beyond belief by the waste,’ she
says. So much so that she has taken to documenting it on her smartphone — her
one concession to modern living, along with a plasma TV, bought for her last
year by her family.
Hot property: Miss Fletcher says her favourite free item
is a digital radio, left, while she also managed to pick up a 15ft palm tree
worth £1,000 for nothing
Her phone certainly contains a chilling record
of our casual approach to our possessions. On it are 5,000 photos, from washing
machines abandoned in front gardens to sofas on the street, and skips full of
computers, bikes and toys.
‘It makes me sad,’ says Cat. ‘There are a lot
of people who have a lot, and a lot of people who have nothing. In between is
all this . . . stuff.’
A lot of this ‘stuff’ is rapidly filling Cat’s
garage: the latest addition is ten panels of double-glazed glass dumped by a
builders’ merchant. ‘I figured I could use them if I built an extension. Or I
can give them away,’ Cat says. Or, I say, she could sell them. ‘I could, but I’m
not in it for the money. If I don’t use them, someone else can have them for
free.’
However, Cat is keen to emphasise that she
wouldn’t knock back a Lottery win if it happened.
‘I live in the real world,’ she says. ‘There
are things I would like to spend money on — knocking through my kitchen into my
living room, getting new carpets — but I don’t have that sort of money.’
And so, until that winning ticket arrives, it
is Freegle and skips all the way, much to her daughters’ dismay. They still live
at home and while they are, their mum says, ‘pretty supportive’ of her ways,
they are not entirely uncritical disciples.
‘They’re teenagers, which means they like new
stuff,’ Cat says. ‘So I do get a bit of “aw, Mum, can we not just buy that for
once?” ’
Her son, Sirus, though, a student, is a chip
off the old block. ‘He sews and patches his own clothes, and he’s a freegan,’
Cat reveals. For the uninitiated, a freegan is someone who eats discarded food
scavenged from supermarket waste bins.
This is a step too far for his mother —
although only because she says it takes too much time and energy.
It takes time and energy to furnish your house
the Cat Fletcher way, too — although there is one big advantage to doing so:
should you want to ring the changes, you can do so guilt-free — she simply
Freegles her old stuff and replaces it. ‘I change things round quite regularly,’
she says. ‘So if you came back in a couple of months, it would probably look
quite different. How many people can say that?’
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