There's something about rescuing chairs and couches and bits of essentialities from the scrapheap that's so satisfying. My mother-in-law rescued a pair of red leatherette chairs when my husband left their house to live on his own. These chairs were here when I arrived, and the funny thing is I am having a hard time agreeing to put these chairs up for sale.

Perhaps it's because of the way these chairs so obviously come from an era where the factory floor was still populated more by humans than machines. The label under the chair has a serial number and when you look closely at the seams and at the finishing, it's quite clear that someone put this chair together by hand. My mind boggles at the thought that ma-inlaw saved these chairs from being feed into the junk eater. If these chairs could talk...

While I think design can be fabulous, I think there's nothing to compare with something that's been put together by the human hand.

We're keeping these chairs, but we're putting other stuff up for sale at the dutch secondhand market (Marktplaats.nl).

I puff and I huff while sorting through the stuff that's accumulated on the floor of our cellar... how many things do we keep stored in our cellars in the hopes we'll use them again someday? I've got a set of six crystal glasses that have never been used, a moroccan hanging lamp that's been buried under everything else for the past three years, a coffee maker (used only once because we got one of those senseo things after we bought it), a rechaud (barely used), a whole crate of tupperware.

Which makes me wonder...why do women love tupperware? Why do we keep on buying tupperware when we already have loads of tupperware pouring out from every possible crevice in the house?