We furnitured our flat almost without spending a cent

Yes, and we are not exaggerating.

In a country like Switzerland, where the life standard is above the world average, you can still find a lot of things for free. And that also includes furniture.

Recently, we moved from a small studio in the city centre to a one bedroom apartment in a neighbourhood close to the city, in a really calm and beautiful area.

As the rent would be higher, we decided that if we take this step, we wouldn’t buy any new furniture, mostly because of the money we needed to spend, but also because we knew how easily we could find a cheaper option.

As soon as we had the flat plan, we started to make our own “draft” about how we would like to have it. We used a software called “floorplanner” (which is free and has a lot of ressources), and this was the result:

So we started to look for furniture. Everyday we checked on websites where people sell all kind of articles, groups on facebook and in our friends circle. As in some other countries, people sometimes give away things they don’t use anymore. So they leave it outside, next to their building and anybody can take it for free. That’s how we came across our first sofa 🙂

As we already had enough furniture for the bedroom, we needed to look for some to the living room, hall and kitchen. The offer is huge, and because of that we needed patience and thinking rationally, otherwise we would start to keep things we didn’t need or didn’t fits to the environment we wanted to create. And it was not that easy.

Hours and hours of searching, tons of exchanged messages until we could start to get the first items. Some of the items we found online were quiet nice, but as we weren’t fast enough contacting the announcers, we couldn’t keep them. So, if you want to find the right items and get them, be ready to spend a lot of time in the computer “waiting” for that announcement you need.

So, try after try, we started to be able to get our first give away stuff. We think we did really nice “aquisitions” and deals. At the first, we said that we would get just things for free, but when we found something that seemed a really nice deal, we tried to keep it, for even a better price. In most of the offers, the owners were opened to deal and to get a fair price for us, as we needed to pick it ourselves. And then, we smiled 🙂

Both of us have a mindset focused on “reuse” old items and recover some others for different purposes. And so we did. When we found something that could be used for some of our needs, we put all our effort on it, et voilá.

The “journey” from the moment you find something you like/want it until the moment you have it at your place is long, and there were some steps we did:

Find the items we liked and we wanted, through friends, websites and facebook groups;
Contact the owner as fastest as we could;
As soon as he/she said it stills available, we asked a few more questions about the items as “marks”, broken parts, and sometimes the reason of the giving away/sale because we think that it is also important. They might giving away because it is not in shape anymore or it has a lot of using marks.
If mostly was ok with the item, we decided to pick it up or to have a look personally (specially in the big items as sofas).
After we did that and we decided to keep it, we needed to get a away to take it from the owner’s place to our place. Luckily we got some help from the family or we went ourselves.
With the big items we had some troubles to bring them in to the flat, but at the end we found out a solution. Be sure about the measures otherwise you can be stuck at the front door with sofas (which happened to us, but luckily we managed that).

Our catches so far:

Living Room: 2 sofas, 1 tv table, 1 center table, trunks for decoration, plants, teppich

Bed Room: 1 teppich, storage for clothes, clothes hanger

Kitchen: dinner table, storage for grocery

Hall: wood box for shoes, trunk, paint, teppich

Balcony: table with 2 chairs