Reinventing the steal

INTERIORS:Look out for furniture for free on a few websites and break out the paint. You can transforming your home for next to nothing, writes CLAIRE O'MAHONY

THE DAYS OF wandering into a furniture shop and lashing out on a chaise longue are over and it is unlikely that anyone planning a house makeover is doing so with a view to upping the selling price. Instead, they’re trying to update what they already have with little spend – and take heart: there are many ways of doing this.

“We’re going out and eating out less - and we’re entertaining at home - so now our living rooms are our restaurant, pub, creche, and in many cases, home office,” says Dara Flynn, editor of Irish interiors magazine House and Home. “It’s still important for us to maintain and change our homes to suit us. But we’re doing it more creatively and resourcefully.”

According to Flynn, her magazine’s readers are increasingly looking to personalise their homes in ways that don’t cost a fortune. “Almost every beautiful house we feature in House and Home is strewn with elements the owners did themselves or vintage finds,” she says. “The three-way mix of designer, high street and vintage is huge – you might have a really pricey walnut floor, but you’ve upholstered an old Chesterfield with a lovely velvet material you got on sale and the rug is from Ikea.”

The furniture giant has invariably become the first port of call for anyone looking for a quick and inexpensive interiors fix. Ikea quotes €532.68 as being its best price to kit out a complete living room, while the best-selling product recently was a shelving unit priced at €19.99.

But Ikea is not the only inexpensive option. Designist on Dublin’s South Great George’s Street, which opened last November, sells a mix of Irish and international products, from stylish decanters to unusual clocks. Nothing costs more than €100. Co-owner Jennie Flynn, who previously worked with a manufacturer whose starter kitchens cost €15,000, saw an opening in the market. “What I’ve been saying for years is what you need is a nice neutral kitchen and then dress it up with beautiful products, so I thought the clever thing to do was to look at accessories.”

Over at Oxfam Home, on Francis Street, Dublin 8, manager Paul Holihan lists some of the current stock. “I’ve got a Parker Knowles suite of furniture in excellent condition for €275; a Laura Ashley coffee table that was €880 new and we’re selling it for €245; bedside lockers for a tenner; an old school desk for €95 and televisions, that have been tested by an electrician, from about €20 upwards.” There is, he says, no key time to drop into the shop looking for deals because stock is being donated all the time and shoppers who don’t have the car capacity to pick up a suite of furniture can avail of a courier service for €30.

However attractive a bargain might be, getting something for free is even more alluring. Sites such as freetradeireland.ie, Freecycle (groups.freecycle.org/freecycleDublin) and JumbleTown Ireland (jumbletown.ie) are proving the diktat that one man’s junk is another’s treasure. The JumbleTown website, which started in 2006, has 51,000 members and 91,000 unique visitors per month. Here, a Giver simply lists an unwanted item on the website and waits for a Taker to come and collect it, with no money changing hands. Des Fitzgibbon, a former geography teacher, set up the site after reading an OECD report that showed that Ireland produced more waste per capita than any other developed country. Despite the recession, many people are still willing to pass on items for free. “Furniture and many other types of household items depreciate in value quickly, and often a quick-sale is not possible,” Fitzgibbons says. “Also, activity on JumbleTown suggests that some members are upgrading the contents of their existing homes, whereas in the Celtic Tiger years they might have moved house altogether. Sadly, quite a few members are emigrating and are passing on a lot of the bulky items they can’t take with them, such as furniture and appliances.”

Pam Flynn, from Dublin’s Baldoyle, is an ardent JumbleTown fan who has managed to do up her holiday home in Leitrim without buying anything except paint and floor tiles. “We bought the cottage five years ago at the height of the boom. It was semi-derelict and we didn’t have a shilling to do it up so JumbleTown was brilliant,” she says. “It took us about a year to do it, from start to finish. We picked up everything – furniture, light fittings, sofa beds, rocking chairs and cutlery. I even got fabric from Jumbletown and made all the cushions covers and soft furnishings and I redid some of the furniture.”

While it’s one thing to pick up a bargain (or free) kitchen table, having the nous to transform it into something special is another matter. Upcycling has gained a lot of interest over the past two years and Lucina Lennon, who runs various DIY courses at Galerie Lisette in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, says there’s been great interest in her workshops. “It seems to be the mood of the moment. As well as being cheap, it’s very satisfying,” she says. “We’re back to colour too, as opposed to the minimalism of the boom years. A locker, originally found in a charity shop and painted turquoise, and placed in a neutral apartment space will really add a bit of zing and you have a little story behind it.”. In terms of spend, Lennon has picked up bedside lockers for as little as €2 each in auction rooms and estimates that a starter kit, to include brushes, paint, finishes and varnishes, will cost €50, but that should cover multiple projects.

“Style and making something look fabulous is a lot like fashion – it really doesn’t have to do with money and is a lot about thinking outside of the box,” says London-based designer Abigail Ahern. The décor crowd’s darling and a champion of DIY and the eclectic look, her book, A Girl’s Guide to Decorating (Quadrille; £16.99) is now on its sixth reprint (the title is tongue-in-cheek, she says).

Ahern’s tips included spray-painting furniture (get it done at a car sprayer’s for a really lacquered look); ignoring the finish on anything you pick up at flea markets because you can always change it; looking at shape and proportion; and disregarding convention and embracing dashes of eccentricity. Her last project was an old drum she turned into a coffee table. “When you pick things up relatively expensively and it doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world to change the colour, so you’re not spending a ton,” Ahern says. “People are looking for more personalised customised interiors and you can’t get that by just buying in mass-market shops.”

As to her failsafe cheap trick? “Paint is the most transformative thing you can do to a room and a can of paint is €20. By adding the odd throw here, re-spraying there and shopping at flea markets and auction rooms, you could make an incredible difference for a couple of hundred euro.”