You’ve heard me wax poetic about how fulfilling it is to get rid of home furnishings and other belongings via Craigslist and Freecycle. Well in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, I’m quoted in an article about giving new life for old furniture–i.e. shopping via consignment shops, yards sales and the like to furnish a home. I think writer (and friend) Jen Miller did a terrific job with the piece.

FYI, currently we have a number of pieces of furniture in our house that are old but which we’ve given new life to:

* a denim covered armchair (where I’m sitting right now) that started life as my father-in-law’s favorite chair when my husband was young. Originally, it was covered in scratchy green-plaid wool, and went off to college with my husband, then to his series of post-college apartments, where it often sat in the apartment, full of memories but too scratchy to actually sit on. A few years into our marriage I surprised him by having the chair and its foot rest recovered in denim. Now I have to fight him to sit in the chair.

* a wood, floor lamp, with a tripod-like footing, that originally sat in my grandparents living room in their Maine home. After my grandparents died, my mother assumed ownership of the lamp, then gave it to me.

* a wooden bench/storage seat that used to hold board games, also at my grandparents’ house in Maine. Now I have it in my dining room, tucked into a bow window, and it holds all of our table linens. When we have extra guests for dinner, we pull the bench up to the table as seating.

* two camel-colored leather couches that my father-in-law had in the living room of his East End, Long Island home. We he moved to Florida, he didn’t want to pay to move the couches, so my husband and I took them. Now those couches, worn almost threadbare-thin, sit at right angles to one another in my kids’ playroom. They’re perfect for each girl to stretch out on when they want to chill out and watch TV.

* five dressers and two nightstands in our bedrooms upstairs. All of these are used or hand-me downs, including a painted-green maple dresser that was my childhood dresser but which my teenager daughter now uses.

You really can give new life to old furniture. What do you have hanging around your house, as far as furnishing go, that used to live somewhere else?

The first time I’d ever heard about Locks of Love was when I was chaperoning my (then) kindergarten daughter’s field trip and noticed a classmate had cut her hair short. This girl had long, gorgeous blond hair, and I know that no little girl chooses to have her hair cut–well, at least not for a good reason. So I asked her why she’d cut her hair. She did it in honor of someone she knew who had died of cancer, and she did it so she could donate her hair to Locks of Love, which makes wigs for kids with hair loss.

That “someone” was one of the pediatricians that my daughter went to. The week before, one of the doctor’s in the practice had died. It was a husband-and-wife practice, and the doctor who’d died was the wife. The couple had three children of their own, and hundreds of local kids in their practice. It made perfect sense that a kindergartener would want to cut her hair to honor a doctor she loved. What a great kid.

Fast forward eight years, and my now 13 year old decided that she wanted to donate her hair to Locks of Love–not because anyone she knows has died (thank goodness), but as one of the service projects that she’s required to do for her upcoming confirmation. She’s also applied to volunteer at the local library, and she’ll be helping my mother out at the church-run thrift store my mother oversees that helps to clothe indigent families in her community.

Turns out that Locks of Love isn’t the only organization that takes hair donations. Pantene, the shampoo people, sponsor something called Beautiful Lengths. It, too, is a hair donation program, but it’s more adult oriented–from the hair donors to the wig recipients. Also, unlike Locks of Love, which requires a minimum of 10 inches of hair, with Beautiful Lengths you can get away with a hair donation of only eight inches.

The more I read about hair donation, the more I realize that doing so really is a green way of getting your hair cut. I mean, currently I compost hair from brushes or the “fuzzies” from when I shave my husband’s head (yes, he’s too cheap to pay for a barber visit, and that’s just fine with me). So you have to wonder how many tons of hair that salons throw in the trash every year when, in fact, they could be doing something else with them.

Most salon owners probably figure that they can’t do anything with hair scraps, right? Wrong! Check out this organization called Matter of Trust that takes hair clippings and turns them into carpets used to soak up oil spills. Or they could follow the lead of this salon owner in the UK I’d read about who really does compost hair. I mean, unlike my backyard compost of food scraps and dried leaves, her compost is comprised of hair clippings and worms.