A family from Alberta, Canada, has nearly completed a year-long experiment in which everything they buy—with a few exceptions for things like food and hygiene—must be previously owned.
Jessica Gabriel, the family matriarch who blogs about their challenge at Nothing New, Nothing Wasted, recently talked to the Globe and Mail about some of the resources her family found most helpful in getting by without buying new:
There’s Kijiji, there’s Freecycle, your friends are wanting to get rid of stuff, and people are constantly upgrading their own stuff, and it’s amazing the quality of goods you can get second-hand and not feel like you’re living a second-hand life.
The Gabriel family also utilized a procedure it calls “up-cycling,” which is basically using some creativity to fix up something that you own or that you got secondhand, thereby creating something new with old materials:
I had some comforters that weren’t all that visually appealing to me, so I recovered them with fabric that I had kicking around. Another thing that my husband did was he got an old dilapidated barbecue from the dump and he cut the legs off of it and made an ice-fishing fireplace out of it.
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Q&A: How to Get Through December without Spending Money