Vocal Voices

I am going to watch this - 7 PM on C4 tonight.

If it wasn't already a fixture, the bathroom, the kitchen sink, everything in our first home was second-hand (1982).

We spent days at auctions and visits to bric-a-brac shops (no charity shops in those days) and stored everything in the FiL's garage till we were ready to move. We had furniture, beds (new mattresses), wardrobes, a cooker, fridge, pots and pans, cutlery, crockery, a TV. You name it we had it.

When we eventually move the house had that "lived in" feel you do not get with new stuff. The only "new" stuff was the paint and the wallpaper.

I wonder what's changed.

We had very little new stuff in our first house - my mother had a friend who was a serial house mover and she had acquired and stored furniture for us. Our first carpets were second hand from the hotel where Edward worked as they were replacing some - great quality they were too! His sister was getting a new dining room table so we got the old one. My FIL was farm manager of a hospital farm and got us dining chairs from the hospital that were being thrown out, we had them re-covered. Our sideboard had been in his henhouse and I painstakingly cleaned and varnished it, and Edward made new shelves which we covered in baize. Even Miss Osc’s cot was second hand (and was handed on again to someone else.) Today’s young people will not know the excitement of saving hard and getting that first new carpet or piece of furniture. I also made our curtains, at which I was less than competent! We knew a lot about recycling!

Very disappointing.

It wasn't a walk through on how to build as home on second hand goods, more a competition to see who could make the most money from the goods they bought. It was a cross between Flog it! and something with "The Great British..." in the title - a game show.

One to miss in the future.

My first place in 1976 was furnished. It was a basement flat in a big town house, just off Ealing Broadway, stuffed full of antique furniture. The old lady who owned it still lived there, she had the ground floor, the rest of the house was let as flats. She was well into her '80's and reminded me of the sweet old lady in that Ealing comedy The Ladykillers

The first place I owned in '79, we had mostly new stuff.

With an old French house, we have a lot of second hand stuff. You get it in Troc places. Some stuff is really good value. Other stuff you can't get any more without paying a fortune.

The only problem in the UK is that you go to an equivalent place and they're charging 5 times as much.

The first place we bought was a new build flat, in 1991. We had no main oven but used a combi microwave and we were given a hob by someone who was having a kitchen refit. The flat was on the market a year or two ago and the same hob was still there!

We didn’t have a sofa for a few months, my aunty lent us two garden chairs

Below is my second hand dining room. There is nothing left in this room of the original house, so this is all bought or handed down.

The table and chairs were a swap with our old set from Scotland.



The Buffet was bought in Trocador. A bit of a play on one mans rubbish. The mirror does not belong to the buffet, it belongs to a different one. I was walking through Trocador when I started walking backwards and looked again. We bought it for under €200.



The display cabinet and the mirror over the fire, seen in the large mirror, were hand me down's from my Uncle and Aunt.



It is a very second hand dining room.