Free Clothing and Furniture
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[edit] Free Clothing and Furniture
Often you can find free chairs, couches, TVs, and all sorts of other stuff listed on the "Free" section of http://www.craigslist.org
See also: http://www.Freecycle.org and see if there's one in your city. They generally like it if new members offer something before requesting other things, but I've heard its a good resource.
[edit] Waste Reclamation
Clothing and furniture are among the items most easily recovered from dumpsters, perhaps just after food. Specifically, the best places to check are thrift stores, such as Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. which generally throw away a significant portion of the items they receive as donations, and sometimes all of them, depending on how much space they have and how quickly they're able to re-organize their stock. Goodwill has recently entered into a contract with the Target Corporation to resell Target merchandise in their stores, meaning that an even smaller portion of donations actually makes it onto their shelves.
Clothing and some types of furniture are also usually in abundance in the trash of students in college or university at the end of a semester (See Squatter's Christmas), along with almost every other conceivable good you could want. A researcher in one of our street survival advisory groups informs us that Goodwill does not allow access to their collection dumpsters in most places, yet he never washes clothes, instead he changes into clean clothes every 2 days from apartment dumpsters, free-stacks people leave, and occasionally purchasing at thrift stores and dollar stores.
[edit] Bedbugs
Bedbugs are flat, oval and reddish brown in color and are about .2 inches long. Bedbugs resemble cockroaches but are wingless and flat and live in your mattress, luggage, or sleeping bag. Free furniture carries the risk of bedbugs: small, hard-to-kill, blood-sucking insects which can infest clothing, bedding, mattresses, couches, and other cushy furniture. While evidence shows that they don't directly spread disease, their bites can be unpleasant and you do not want them. There are two ways to kill bedbugs: heat and starvation. Furniture that can withstand steam-heat can be sprayed down with steam before being brought into your home. Furniture that cannot be steamed can be airtight sealed in plastic for 3-6 months. Some people put furniture out in deep winter for a few weeks to kill the eggs. Even more effective is the clothes dryer, put clothing and sleeping bags in the dryer to 'hard boil' bedbug eggs, especially after travel to areas with bedbug infestations.
[edit] Clothing
Some clothing stores have racks of clothes outside of the store which are on clearance or sale. You can easily steal a few items and leave without being noticed. Keep in mind that this is shoplifting, so standard penalties apply.
Check out http://www.instructables.com/id/ENHY329F4GVCSLE/ for a guide on how to remove clothing ink tags.
At any store without security tags on their jeans, you can just pull the old switcharoo. Wear your old shitty jeans you no longer want, go to the fitting room with a pair you do want from the racks, take off the tags and put on the pants, put your old ones back on the hanger, and hang them up on the rack.
It's also not terribly difficult to make clothes. Start with smaller items until you get good, but at that point you can easily make clothes that are cheaper, more durable and maybe even more stylish than those you'd usually pay hundreds for. You can even spin it off into something of a business, then you can use the money to make a whole wardrobe.
