Living in a Land of Abundance

Published: 2026-03-31

I live in a land of abundance. It just took moving half way around the world for me to fully appreciate it!

Let me share the moral of my story up front: With some patience and a gatherer’s mindset, you can save money, improve your life, and be kind to the environment.

For context, last year my husband and I relocated from Australia back to Canada. And, as it turns out, shipping stuff 18,000 km is pretty freakin expensive. Thus, we were faced with the brutal decision of what to leave behind. Even though we moved to Oz with a very modest amount of stuff and rented furnished apartments, we still had to sell or give away the accumulation of three years of living before we returned home. Ultimately, we returned to Canada with just a few mementos: our clothes, board games, roller derby gear, and computers. (Actually we returned several months before our stuff, which took another six months to arrive by sea!)

We turned a page to begin a whole new chapter as we settled in a new city with no furniture or furnishings. In many ways we were starting from scratch.

What a cool opportunity.

We could have easily rushed to buy everything we “needed” brand new on day 1. But we didn’t want to spend a tonne of money while we were finding our feet. So, we decided to rebuild slow. We chose to take our time to source most of what we needed second hand.

And, wow-zah, did the world provide! One major benefit to living in a big city is that there are plenty of people with more stuff than they know what to do with.

These are the places we found free stuff:

  1. Freecycle
  2. Kijiji Free posts
  3. Online community sites (for example, our roller derby league has a Slack channel for members to exchange free stuff)
  4. “Free Stuff” left at the end of driveways
  5. Friends and family

And here are items that we found for free!

  1. Coffee table
  2. End Tables (used as bedside tables)
  3. TV cabinet
  4. Computer Desk
  5. Piano bench seat
  6. Two dressers (both of which we ended up giving away)
  7. Kitchen table & four chairs
  8. Dining table & six chairs
  9. Ceramic bowl
  10. Serving Bowls
  11. Sauce pot
  12. Bicycle
  13. A full set of chef knives
  14. Brie ceramic baking pot with lid and a cute little bamboo paddle knife (I love it so much!)
  15. Place mats and cloth napkins
  16. Several small baskets
  17. Laundry hamper
  18. Two small garbage cans with swinging lids
  19. Bathroom garbage can with foot pedal
  20. Kitchen garbage can
  21. Kitchen step stool
  22. End table lamp
  23. Floor lamp
  24. A fancy wine corkscrew
  25. Two 23L glass carboys
  26. Around 60 wine bottles
  27. A set of very fluffy towels, still new in packaging
  28. An iron
  29. Garden hose winder
  30. Plant pots
  31. Art supplies
  32. Sewing supplies
  33. Knitting supplies
  34. Weighted work out vest
  35. Glassware & mugs, including wine and martini glasses
  36. Wood salad tongs
  37. Paint
  38. Broom with dust pan
  39. Snow shovel
  40. Hanging file folders
  41. Ink jet printer with scanner
  42. Glass bread pan
  43. Metal bread pan
  44. Stone rolling pin (which we also gave away, along with a few boxes of other misc kitchen stuff)
  45. An adorable apron with lots of huge pockets
  46. Electric sandwich press & grill
  47. Ikea shoe cabinet

And probably some other items that I’ve forgotten about.

We also frequented thrift stores, The ReStore, and Kijiji to buy second hand items like these:

  1. Coffee maker
  2. Coffee grinder
  3. Bread knife
  4. Slow cooker
  5. Glass casserole dishes
  6. Clothes

You do need to be patient to follow this approach. You also need to be willing to deep clean items and sometimes mend them. I find giving items a second life and saving them from a landfill extremely rewarding. Often second hand items are basically as good as new and would have become trash if they hadn’t been rescued.

You also need a sense of humour or maybe a dose of humility. You need to find the joy in the moment and be grateful for what you have rather than begrudging what you don’t. My husband and I enjoyed a few weeks of dining cross legged at coffee table before we found tables and chairs. I actually found it kinda romantic. We wouldn’t have had such a memorable time if we had just run out to buy furniture. We’re still searching for a decent kettle, which means I’m currently boiling water for my tea in a pot. And that’s okay. It’s really not a big deal and, when we do find a kettle we like, we will appreciate it all the more!

We feel very fortunate to have found so many useful things. We didn’t need to spend heaps of money and we didn’t need to go into credit card debt. We just needed to take our time while living in a land of abundance.

Join the Conversation