DIY Big Pop...

My housemate and I spent a large part of August trawling the streets of Selly Oak following a practice known as 'skip-diving'. This also applies to gardens. In the month of July, it appears that the local council observes a sort of 'furniture amnesty', where old battered sofas, tables, and cupboards are left in front gardens or on the pavement (sidewalk) of this student-dominated residential area and picked up by the council for disposal. I realise this may sound like hell to those of you who live in nicer neighbourhoods, but it's a fact of life round here, where the idea is that many people don't have the means to take these things to public dump sites.

Well. We picked up a three-seater sofa, a one-seater sofa, two tables, seven chairs, a dresser table minus legs, a coffee table, a filing cabinet, and three biscuit tins. Most of these we palmed off on our friend who is moving into an unfurnished flat - we cleaned them all up and checked for spiders, but mostly they were perfectly serviceable, just a little bit tatty.

We kept the table and four dining chairs, and my friend suggested they needed "a little love". We began this 'loving' last night, and figured it was somewhat reminiscent of Big Brother (this year the inmates were each given a plain chair from IKEA and told to paint it). I had been down to the DIY store and bought a value pack of three grades of sandpaper and some small tins of spray paint. Thus it was that yesterday evening's procrastination activity was the sanding down of the flaking white paint from a chair, washing it, and spray painting it. I am not (I hope) being too big headed when I say the result looks superb.

That's the idea, basically. Instead of putting ten people in a house all ready furnished in IKEA, cut your costs by giving them the flatpacks and telling them to make it themselves. Or giving them each a skip to dive into, to see what they can reclaim. Give them limitless spray paints and sandpaper (but no naff stencil sets, or rulers or spirit levels, heh heh). Since a poorly-sanded chair will lose its paint before a well sanded and washed one, this will sort the grafters from the lazy swines. Artistic talents may come to the fore, but so will bullshitting. All in all, more entertainment for the first couple of days. Although we know that the placement of furniture was somewhat constrained by camera angles, we wondered whether it was too cruel to *not* fit a kitchen, but make the inmates have to put together their own kitchen (plumbing?! wiring?! Darwin awards!) before they could even eat. Cue some comedy whining.