A couple who own a scrapyard generates their dream wedding from score using salvaged items from their dump – saving themselves over £20,000.
When Melissa Drabble, 40, and her husband Mark, 41, got engaged, they cleared to use some of the hundreds of thousands of things brought into their fragment metal merchant company.
The pair managed to save chairs, candlesticks, cake stands and chalices from skips, which they upcycled, disco balls and an actual phone box to decorate the pavilion they bought secondhand for their garden wedding celebration.
All the tables for their big day came free from a local pub being demolished, and even Melissa’s betrothment ring was brought in as scrap gold and cost them just £140.
The couple’s wedding cost an estimated £6k in total – a vast £24,000 saving on the £30k they had estimated it would come to.
Melissa said: “To have a different wedding was always my aim, and I love to stand out from the crowd.
“My challenge was to make our marriage from things we could reuse and recycle.
“On the day, a patron asked, ‘Where did you get this?’. And I told them, ‘The skip!’.
“It was a lot of force to get everything done, but its move to plan on the day and glance even better than I hoped.”
Couple Turns Scrapyard Finds into a Beautiful Ceremony
The childhood sweethearts, who run scrap metal trader Tin Man Scrap in Buxton, Derbyshire, converge in 1999 when they were both adolescents and moved on to have two boys, now 21 and 20.
They started a small business together after entrepreneurial Mark began to “meddle in bits of scrap” and revolve their garden shed into a squandered metal yard before expanding to bigger units.
The opening idea was that people would bring fragment metal to be weighed in and valued for them to take away and recycle, but after finding many items too good to be melted down, they began vend on their best finds.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson confirmed on Wednesday evening that there would be a pay freeze for most teachers in England in 2021/22.
But the Government confirmed that teachers earning under £24,000 would receive an uplift of £250.
An IFS analysis suggested that teacher salaries would be around 8% lower in real terms than 14 years ago, just before the financial crisis. They would be about 4% to 5% lower for less experienced teachers.
“In contrast, average earnings across the whole providence have risen by about 0.6% in the real world between 2007 and 2021,” the report stated.
Couple Uses Salvaged Items to Create Their Dream Wedding
The analysis added: “There was a slight recovery in retention rates for the latest year of data, as one might expect given the finite number of employment chance during the pandemic.
“However, this only takes retention rates back to where they were about three to four years ago and is probable to be short-lived if there is a recovery in crust employment opportunities.
Luke Sibieta, the research fellow at the IFS, said: “It is astounding that teacher pay levels endure so far below what they were before the financial crisis in 2007.
“The 8% drop in earnings for more experienced teachers has almost certainly contributed to the worsening picture on teacher recruitment and retention.
“The fact that it has taken a worldwide pandemic and economic crisis to ease the coerce on the teacher labour retail illustrates the scale of the challenge.
“To stop these problems getting worse, the Government will need to provide above-inflation awards from 2022 onwards.”
Louise Hatswell, conditions of employment specialist at the Association of School and College head(ASCL), said the IFS’ findings were “stark”.
She said: “Quite how the Government expects schools and colleges to successfully attract recruits to their ranks given the parlous state of teacher pay is mystifying.”
Ms Hatswell added: “The Government has spent the pandemic praising teachers and education leaders for their sterling efforts in keeping our schools and colleges running, but its words have a hollow ring when the reality is it had no intention of rewarding them and instead imposed a further pay freeze.”
How One Couple Turned Junk into the Wedding of Their Dreams
Kevin Courtney, the joint general assistant of the National Education Union, said: “Teachers and school leaders will be as important in the recovery from the pandemic as they have been in the pandemic response – the Government must act urgently to quickly restore the real-term losses inflicted on the profession if we are to value teachers and avoid creating yet more recruitment and retention problems.”
Dr Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said the analysis added “further damning proof” that teachers were “worse off” because of ongoing cuts to their salaries.
He said: “The NASUWT continues to argue vociferously against further pay freezes. This damages recruitment, retention and morale, particularly in the context of the vital work teachers do serving on the frontline during the pandemic.”
A Government spokesperson said: “We are incredibly grateful for teachers’ and leaders’ hard work during the pandemic, and last year we announced the most significant pay rise for the occupation since 2005, with above-boom rises for every teacher in the country.
