A Healthy Home | Reduce, Reuse, & Recycle your way to a Sustainable Home
This might be my favourite topic when it comes to sustainable design. I absolutely love taking pre-loved existing pieces in a home and repurposing them. I love that it adds character and personality and can be completely unique and one-of-a-kind. The added bonus: You're not creating an additional carbon footprint because it’s already been made!
Here are some of my tips and tricks to reducing reusing and recycling furniture in your home.
Where to find suitable furniture to repurpose
Your own home
We love to shop our clients homes for existing furniture & lighting that they have perhaps overlooked. We can refresh the item and give it new life in a new room or colour.
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Consignment & thrift stores
I love these stores because you can truly find some gems that are often in really good condition. Consignment stores have a criteria they follow and usually only accept goods they know will sell and that are in almost perfect condition.
I love to find tables and chairs and any wood furniture items here. I will often take a photo of an item and send it to my refinisher for quoting before I purchase it. This way I know what it’s going to cost me before I buy it.
The one downside is that all items are final sale. There are no returns of refunds so make sure you’ve measured your space before you shop!
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Here are my top picks for stores in Toronto. Some are even offering online virtual shopping now too!
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Antique Markets
One of my favourite ways to find unique, high quality furnishings and accessories is at Antique Markets. It’s also a great excuse to get out of the city into the country for a day. I shared all about how to shop antique markets in a recent blog post: “How to shop Antique Markets”.
One of the key elements here is that Price is ALWAYS negotiable. You can find great deals, especially if you wait until the end of the day.
Antique markets have so many gems from far and wide and are often better priced than a consignment store.
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Online
This is more and more common. So many people want to get rid of furniture, lighting etc. and just can’t be bothered to contact a consignment store. So they will post the items for sale online. Price is usually negotiable here too. You’ll want to ensure that you inspect the item in person before handing over the money. Sometimes pictures can lie!
Some great place sto look online are:
We recently designed two model homes for clients using a plethora of second hand items that were either perfect and used “as-is” or we had them refinished and new upholstery made.
View the Oak Park & Maple Model Homes.
What are some of your pieces that you can’t part with? If you need some help on how to breathe new life into it, let me know and send me a pic!