Many students I have met are well aware of the street bounty offered up the night before trash day around Amsterdam, particularly in nicer neighborhoods like the Jordaan.

There is another place where you can find all sorts of unique objects to personalize, and 'jazz up', your home. Even if (or especially if !) you are only in Amsterdam temporarily.

Every day the Waterlooplein street market vendors begin the shutdown, and weeding out, of their junk. Certainly the real antiques will be held onto, ready to wait out the following days, but plenty of really great stuff is discarded every night!

The best time to go is 5:30 or 6. Some of the objects I've adopted in the past year and a half here:
A large beautiful rug. A small table on wheels. A painted plate from Tenerife. A bronz plate from Morocco. Several glass vases. Several baskets. Old maps of Europe. Old maps of Holland. And, much, much more. Some of the weirder objects tended to scare people in my old flat. These were picked up by my previous roommate who had an eccentric flair for decorating, including a giant sized barbie doll head with half her hair missing, and a large broken painting that eerily resembled her, as if it were her very own great grandmother.

It can be great fun to go trash picking, if you're not scared by the highly competitive junkies and fellow students! And you will certainly find something special, something that feels as if it were left there just for you. Happy picking!