Charity shops and re-use forums are great places to find knick-knacks, but can you create an entire home from them? Sarah Lewis discovers a community of land snails, yachts, makeovers and big-hearted generosity

Cat Fletcher insists people should want more things. It’s an unusual comment from a dedicated environmentalist, someone who signs their emails with the tag line “Happily reducing landfill”. Cat is the creator of the GreenCycleSussex forum, an online re-use group created in the aftermath of the recent Freecycle meltdown, where people offer for free items they no longer use or ask for goods they need.

She says: “People want things and they should ask for more! Someone once posted they wanted a staircase. Wanted posts like that are great. They make people realise they may have things people might want.”

For anyone familiar with Freegle or Freecycle, they will know that shelves, either on offer or being requested, are the mainstay of any local re-use group.

But for the dedicated and patient Freegler there are incredible riches to be found and users have exchanged land snails, squids, cars and even a yacht.

Eco designer Oliver Heath recently renovated a three- bedroom house near Worthing using solely charity shop and Freecycle finds on a budget of just £500.

Oliver says: “We just took everything we found because we could always paint it or wallpaper it, recover it or be creative somehow and make it work, even if it needed a little TLC. All it takes is a little bit of imagination and creativity to use them.”

Drawers from a broken sideboard were turned into shelves, he says, and a battered old armchair given a facelift with bright, clashing bits of fabric sewn together using the pattern from the original, removable cover.

A trip to IKEA would probably be much quicker, but according to the Furniture Re-use Network, more than ten million unbroken and perfectly usable items of furniture are sent to landfill ever year. That equates to about 30,000 items a day – more than enough to kit out a house.

Oliver says he and his team met so many people working on brilliant projects, recycling fabric or reclaiming wood, “there was a lovely sense of community that came out of it”.

Bella Kirkus, a mother of two from Brighton, is another person who has discovered that community, after buying The Big Issue from a heavily pregnant woman in Lewes one Saturday morning.

“I went back and gave her some money for the baby and she told me she already had three children and didn’t have anything. I thought, I’ve got everything in the world, I don’t want for anything but there was a time in my life when I was homeless and I really struggled.”

Bella posted on GreenCycleSussex that she was looking for clothes and baby goods to help a homeless lady and was soon inundated with emails.

She has collected a buggy, a Moses basket, a cot as well as boots, shoes and clothes and a list of places to go for advice on how to help get her off the streets.

“People have been really generous,” she says. “I’m in such a fortunate position and it’s so easy for me to go on Greencycle to help. I’m really not doing that much, just facilitating.”