At the other end of motherhood, I spent a couple of days going up to Durham to collect the eldest child after her first year. If you ever want to set up in a new home, go to any hall of residence the last week of June and look in the skips outside. All those moving from hall (shared self catering flats) to a house will be chucking out their IKEA cutlery, pots, pans and laundry equipment, even their duvets and towels. They were literally brimming over. I brought ours back to this office where we are enjoying using the nice things I spent a small fortune on last September, as I refused to chuck it all away like the other parents. But seven sets of kitchen equipment into one small, grotty student house does not go.....

Catheryn, I bet in the States there are companies that buy all that end-of-academic-year stuff and then sell it to the start-of-academic-year crowd a few months later. Someone should get working on that here. A few well-organised hippies with a barn/hangar should be able to do wonders for the cost of student occupancy while turning a modest profit into the bargain.

Rob, there's a lot of craigslisting for that purpose...but at my college there was a yearly "yard sale" on the main green at the end of the year, mostly for seniors who wanted to get rid of all their stuff.