TV review: Kirstie's Fill Your House For Free

But after watching Kirstie's Fill Your House For Free on Channel 4, I've come to the conclusion that my bargain hunting days are over.

The programme follows property guru Kirstie Allsopp and her team of designers as they attempt to decorate people's homes with free furniture . . . or should I say, junk?

According to Kirstie: "There's a revolution going on throughout the country, turning the kerbside into a shopping Mecca."

I must have missed it.

When I started watching last night's instalment, I thought to myself: "I could probably furnish my house for free too if I didn't mind sitting on a stained sofa after closing a pair of mismatched curtains."

But I decided to give Kirstie the benefit of the doubt.

Oh how I wish I hadn't. The annoyingly chipper house hunter tried to put a positive spin on what was essentially an unsavoury exercise in bin-dipping.

To prove how much there is out there for the taking, she set up a shop in Glasgow full of free items from across the country.

She then invited husband-and-wife Curt and Nicola Marlow who were victims of flooding, into the store.

Understandably they were on a strict budget of zero pounds after buying a new property. Kirstie priced up the cost of furnishing their home at a whopping £7,600 and quickly set about creating a fireplace out of a recycled bathroom door.

The end result? A huge wooden monstrosity that resembled a chopped up bathroom door.

Meanwhile, another designer visited Jules Pritchard who had also been a victim of flooding.

Her furniture had been damaged by flood waters in 2007 and 2012 and now she was unwilling to refurnish her family room with new pieces out of fear it was going to happen again.

Kirstie quickly got to work with one of the members of her team who set about making a sofa from a wooden pallet usually found in your local supermarket.

It cost £0 to make but even that was overpriced.

The final straw was when somebody came up with the idea to make mirrors out of old tennis racquets.

And I thought Changing Rooms with Carole Smillie used to be bad!

Back at Curt and Nicola's place, designer Max McMurdo decided to make a chair out of an old shopping trolley.

The reaction was not what he had expected however, as one of his critics described it as 'looking like a shopping trolley,' strange that.

Instead he put all of his efforts into transforming a radiator into a coffee table with copper pipe legs.

The couple were delighted with it, I was aghast. I could just imagine banging my legs on the sides every time I got up to make a cuppa. The second Kirstie and her team left I'd be calling the scrap man.

Astonishingly, a buyer valued the goods, which included a table made from old suitcases and lampshades covered in wallpaper at £3,000. I would be straight on eBay with the lot.

It wasn't all a load of old rubbish though. Kirstie offered some money-saving tips including how to dig-out freebies on websites such as Freegle, Freecycle and Gumtree, how to spruce up bits of old metal and where to get free bits of wood.

Charlotte Lilley