Your old sheets and bedding can be excellent to save as drop-cloths for interior painting jobs, or as rags for cleaning if you rip them into manageable rag size. You can also recycle textiles at many locations, so you don’t every need to throw them away.

Ask for anything you’d like for your bedroom, including a new style bed complete with mattress and box spring. Mattresses are expensive to toss and many folks give away perfectly reusable ones that will last for years! They are also quite toxic for the environment so using a mattress fully is one way you can help to fight climate change and landfill overfilling. Bedding, throw pillows, and design elements for your room are fun to keep an eye out for.

If you already have plastic organizers for your kids’ toys and other belongings, keep using them! The longer they spend out of our landfills, incinerators, and oceans, the better. If you’re in the market for new bins or containers, consider asking in your Buy Nothing community for baskets from natural materials, decorated cardboard boxes, etc.

Give your children permission to pass along gifts that aren’t their favorites to other families that use the BuyNothing app, and give them space to play with what does interest them, combined however they see fit. Keep those things that are meaningful, useful, well-made, and beautiful. Remember that creative play does not require mountains of toys, just a head full of ideas and time to bring them to life.