interior hunting: thrifting for free

now that Joost and I are quite confident that we will actually move into our new house, my favorite part of moving has started: the hunt for goods to fill our new house with! And as you may have guessed, we're not doing that by spending all our money at some interior store, no: we hunt online and in thrift shops for second hand furniture.

We already bought some pretty nice things, such as an antique bathtub (with those adorable legs!) for 60 euros, a real wooden floor for 175,- and a second hand fridge and dishwasher for 150 euros. But what's even better is that we actually scored a few items completely for free! 

No kidding! If you look at online secondhand sites such as marktplaats.nl (it's my favorite site), there are A LOT of free items available. 

So, let's have a look at what we've scored so far, shall we? 

Starting with our dinner chairs. We got 4 of these chairs from a really nice lady who wanted to buy new ones, and wanted to get rid of the old ones as soon as possible, so she advertised them only for free. I didn't think they were very beautiful, but Joost convinced me to get them because they are really comfortable and practical.

When we got them, they were white. 

nice, but not yet perfect...

Since we didn't really like them as they were, we started removing the white paint, and look how they turned out:

That white/wooden look is so pretty!!!

With the new color of the wood, I even like the reed! I saw seen very similar chairs for a few hundred bucks each, so I'm so smug we got them for nothing else then some elbow grease and a bit of time! 

A few weeks ago I found these bricks for free on Marktplaats. On building material sites, these old bricks called "Friese geeltjes"(Frisian yellows) go for around 0,80 cent each, so I really thing we have struck gold here! I think they will look great as a terrace next to our white little farmhouse.

And then there are also these doors...

The house we bought is quite old, originating from 1900. But after an extensive renovation in the sixties, many of the old details were removed. During this renovation they also replaced the old doors by plain, white laminate doors. When we looked for the first time at the house, I sighed to Joost that it was such a pity that there weren't any old panelled doors left in the house.

But then I found these online:

free doors amongst the moving boxes!!
ps: do you like my thrifted little desk and alphabet?

Although the photo doesn't show it, we actually got 3 of them. Fitting them in our tiny car was a bit of an adventure (I had to lie on top of them while Joost was driving home) but I think they are gorgeous. I'm not sure if I want to replace the glass by a clear version, and I'm also not entirely sure how I want to paint them... Keeping them in a light color, or maybe remove the paint entirely and use it with the bare wood showing...? hmmm... 

So, I hope you liked this little peek in our interior-hunts!

Have you ever scored some beautiful items for free?