Student IKEA for grown-ups

In the long-gone student days my house mates and I used to furnish our flat with the perfectly clean and adequate, but no longer wanted items that our lovely fellow citizens left in the streets the night before the bulk rubbish collection which the local council organised twice a year. We called it the 'Student IKEA' because the
selection of goods was almost as good (...or as bad, depending on your taste). We were equally driven by our shortage of cash as well as critical views towards excessive consumerism/waste of resources/sweat shops/etc, though I am not quite sure which one prevailed the moment we discovered yet another wonderful armchair/sofa/wardrobe/etc.

Having moved into our new house recently we find ourselves in a similar dilemma again: how to turn this empty space into a home without a shopping frenzy at the local IKEA equivalent. In Bristol we used gumtree occasionally, both for furnishing our old place as well as passing on lots of our stuff when we left. So we though, hey, let's see if something like this also exists in Santiago. It does (Anuncios gratis en Chile / free classifieds) and I am pleased to report that it works!

Last week I spent about 20 hours half-lying half-sitting with the notebook on our bed so we made it a priority to sort out a proper work space this weekend. Patricia made a few phone calls on Friday, someone was selling a desk, chair and bookcase for a reasonable amount of money, though inconveniently at the other side of town, some 20km away. But no problem, there are also people on olx who offer services, so we got a man with a van to meet me at the seller's place and take the whole lot back to our house.

Turns out that Tomás, who was selling the stuff, is shortly leaving for Brighton in the UK to do a PhD there, and Francisco and Mario, the van people, were very good company on the ride back home who told me about another German they used to share a house with and I told them about couch surfing... in brief: a much more personal and satisfying shopping experience than we could have had at the nearby Mall or IKEA-look-a-like.

We still need to get a few other things, a dining table with chairs would be nice, for example, but these are less urgent and we'll probably find something on olx soon...

A satisfied customer in his new(ish) shiny and fully functional locally sourced second-hand office