Edinburgh Furniture Initiative

I love the Edinburgh Furniture Initiative — basically a big warehouse in Canonmills, run by the brilliant homelessness charity Foursquare, where donated furniture is cleaned up, restored and then resold to raise money.
The sad truth though is that it isn’t what it was. The layout has changed dramatically since the last time I was in. Instead of narrow rows of stacked tables, sideboards, chests, wardrobes, picture frames and oddments to explore, it’s now much more like a regular furniture store, with much of the floor space given over to mock room layouts.
The result is that there’s much less stock on the floor, browsing is less fun and, frankly, it all looks a bit tired. The limited selection on show definitely hadn’t been spruced up with EFI’s usual care and seemed overpriced.
It might just be that the EFI receives fewer donations these days — maybe people are choosing to sell through eBay or Gumtree rather than donate, which would be sad — but whatever the reason, I hope this isn’t a permanent situation. Was a four-​star, now a two-​star, so I’m optimistically rating it half way.