You’ll all be relieved to know that the number of sofas in this house has been reduced to one, thanks to those lovely guys from SOFA. I highly recommend these people if you have furniture to donate: much cheerier than the British Heart Foundation and far less sniffy than LOROS who won’t even take something if it has a bit of dust on it, these guys set to with a will, undeterred by ink spots and merely concerned with how sturdy the structure was. Now that’s my kind of recycling.
In the process though, I have found a couple of useful bits of info, to whit Leicestershire and Rutland re-use network (though the website is temporarily offline) which actually carry out repairs and upcycling, and www.freeuseit.org (though they merely give suggestions rather than taking stuff). It was also suggested I might try the Red Cross who help refugees to set up home (legally, lest any Daily Mail readers should start frothing at the mouth) and any of these would have been my next port of call. Failing all of them I’d have freecycled the bits as foam cushions and pieces of wood. I was determined to save it from the tip.
Give that woman a gold star!
I mean it. I want my gold star.
Now, a propos of all this recycling and retoastering (did I tell you about the toaster? Possibly not; I’ll get to that in a minute) I’ve started another blog in conjunction with Loughborough Quakers. It’s all about our efforts to live more sustainably and you can find it here.
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 
SOFA sound brilliant. We have a similar charity organisation here called Future for Furniture. Although they declined a suite – I was helping my neighbours get rid of – when I offered it to them due to it lacking the fire labels (I believe that’s an insurance issue for them); they also have limited space and understandably only accept things they know they can shift quick (I got my sofa and dining room table from them). In the end I offered this sofa on Freecycle and it was collected by someone who liked the style of it and was keen to restore and re-cover it. It shows that there is a lot of scope for this kind of thing, especially if charities are prepared to restore things themselves to avoid things going to “landfill” – coverings and fillings could surely be replaced with ones with the necessary labels.
I think it’s a large British Heart Foundation store that is new to the “retail park” in Holyhead near me; I have been in there once and while they had a large selection of well organised clothes at a good price (as well as some furniture) the store seemed too polished and super-store-like; I prefer charity shops to have nooks-and-crannies crammed with random items.
I agree about the British Heart Foundation; the ones here sell a lot of new stuff and like you say it’s a bit corporate. I think the fire label is a legal requirement though