Fill Your House, the latest TV series from Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer's Raise the Roof Productions, on UK Channel 4 features Kirstie and a team of designers who fill your house with free items. A 'swap shop' was set up in Glasgow filled with free furniture, apart from some upcycled designer pieces like a stainless steel washing machine drum coffee table at £400, to prove that you can do up your home for free.
 
On last Tuesday's show, which reached 1.9m viewers, a couple from Kent visited the Glasgow shop to choose free items for their kitchen, dining room and lounge. The designers transformed the items aiming to make the couple's home more robustly child-friendly and stylish. A younger couple were also helped to update their bedroom.
 
The programme may be useful for the uninitiated who have not heard about Freecycle, Freegle, Yooz, Gumtree and eBay. Charis Williams aka Salvage Sister mentioned 'give and take events' as a way to find free household items. These are similar to the ones already started by Gok Wan for clothes swaps but maybe more difficult to organise with larger items of furniture and safety would need to be considered for electrical items. To find out about these it was suggested to check council websites or social network postings.
 
Visit Kirstie's Scrapbook for web links to sources mentioned on the programme and other upcycling ideas including a link to SalvoWEB, and several Salvo Code dealers, mentioned in the TV series Kirsties Homemade Home when she went to reclamation yards to find bargain home items.
 
SalvoWEB has a worldwide directory of architectural salvage and reclamation yards and an online marketplace of professionally recrafted or upcycled items currently ranging from a beautiful arched mirror made from an original antique window frame, salvaged from the Tate Britain in London, priced at £1,440 to a hand painted chair with a reupholstered seat for £40. Not free, but saves doing it yourself and redone to a high standard. And guilt-free shopping for reused things may mean helping to save the planet.
 
It is also worth searching for items in charity warehouses. Many charity shops and warehouses have household items and safety-checked electrical items which can be found through the Furniture Re-use Network. The FRN has encouraged the reuse of unwanted items for many years now particularly helping low income households. It has diverted 90,000 tonnes of waste from landfill and saved over 100,000 tonnes of CO2.
 
The programme #fillyourhouse, had mixed views on twitter last night. There were unfavourable comparisons to the old TV home programme 'Changing rooms' with its use of MDF. Kirstie's idea that it was all free was also criticised as the final cost of items redone was around £400. Many people loved the show with its design ideas and could not wait to start doing it for themselves.
 
Kirstie and Raise the Roof Productions, whatever your view on the design ideas, can only be praised for her continued support of reuse - and indirectly the world of salvage through SalvoWEB and the Salvo Code.