A Great Haul

Posted by Vulnadia on Jul 19, 2009 at 09:37 PM

Thursday afternoon, one of those interesting freecycle emails came through. I rarely actually ever land much of anything off of freecycle, but I have to try! Usually, I am looking for things I can use for my theater or its fundraiser Haunted Attraction that we are currently working on. Several weeks ago, I landed a couple of really nice office chairs, so I had a bit of hope this time. The email was for free furniture. Possibly, a LOT of free furniture and if you are with a non-profit organization, you can call and reserve things before the furniture is offerred to the general public. I called Husband and let him know about my possible find and to see how much, if any, he thought we could actually transport and store at the moment. He let me know that we already were scheduled to borrow a friend's 20 foot trailor in order to move some set pieces from where we had them stored since the last show that we did. So, I decided to call and see what all they had available still. I called, with my meager order of 4 sofas and 8 chairs if they still had any available. The lady said that I was the only person who had called in about any of it. She invited me to come out on Friday and look at everything, saying that none of it was very pretty as it had formerly been basically dorm furniture. After I dropped Bregon off at film camp on Friday, the babies and I headed out to LSUS to meet with the lady and check out the furniture. She gave us permission to come back that evening and get whatever it is that we can use and arrangements would be made to keep the gate open for us as well. We were told that we could have as much of it as we wanted! That evening, I began to worry because the trailor had been loaned out and did not meet us back at the church as promised. It's owner was there, but the trailor had yet to make it! We decided to go ahead and move everything outside and see what needed to travel where while we waited on the trailor. It showed up with no time to spare and we loaded our props into the truck, the suburban and strapped our mantlepiece to the front of the trailer and headed out to LSUS. When we got there, we stopped at the first of the furniture dumpsters only to discover that it was full of matching chairs. This was one of those extra long types that is about 8 feet tall and 30 feet long, and it was overflowing with chairs. Husband and my Director just sat there and stared, saying nothing aloud, but the wheels were turning in their heads for everyone to see. They suddenly looked at each other and said, "THEATRE SEATING!" almost simultaneously. Then Husband climbed up and jumped into the pile of chairs, and started handing them off to us. I went and brought the overflow chairs over and stacked them on to the trailer. An hour later, we had stacked at least 40 chairs and we were thinking that we could call it a day at twice that or so. So, we did a little puzzle piecing and creative packing and managed to fit a nice, tidy 92 chairs on to that trailer somehow. Oh, we still had room left, for you see, we also needed at least four sofa's for the greenroom. While they finished loading the last of the chairs, I walked around and scoped out the other three dumpsters. We grabbed the rest of the couch cushions off of the second one, then headed to the front for the sofa stash. All in all we managed to get our four sofa's, a living room type chair and two coffee tables for our green room. Then we ended up with no less than 92 matching chairs that we plan to recover and use as theater seating. Now, all we really lack is a permanent building and we will be in business!