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Little by little, the ugly things are leaving the house. Take my back yard, for example. This hideous (and inexplicably placed) stone birdbath has seen better days:
Thanks to ten minutes of posting and a lovely woman named Deborah on Craigslist, this eyesore now has a new home on her much larger (and wooded) bird-loving property. The woman was very happy with her new find (Seriously. The woman loves birdwatching – she even wanted to go through my garage to see if I had any birdhouses available). And I am left with one more empty space to figure out.
I didn’t realize it was so easy to get rid of the things that bug you on Craigslist. I didn’t want it, so was happy to give it away for free… though, after the flood of phone calls I received about the birdbath, I guess I could have just as easily sold it for remodeling funds.
Can you believe that people even try to sell their old (and dusty) silk plants on Craigslist? Not give them away… sell! If I ever do have a garage sale, I’m not going to even bother putting it out in my driveway. Online certainly seems like the way to go: all you need is a pic (so no effort), a post, and the interested parties come and take it away for you!
Have you ever put something on Craigslist you never thought anyone would want, only to find 300 voicemails like I did? I’d love to hear your Craigslist stories :)
an old DISH satellite
.. the previous owners left it at house & since I have DirecTV, I wanted the dangling dish removed. When I called Dish to have it removed, they wanted me to pay $30 for them to take it away! I had my cousin take it down and someone actually paid $10 for it. To think I was going to throw it away too…
We have something in our area called FreeCycle. Functions like Craigslist, but it is (you guesses it) free. Keeps stuff out of the landfill. I have to say it has given me huge pleasure to give stuff away. I gave away a partially completed tapestry to a woman recovering from surgery on her hand who wanted to regain mobility, and bunk beds to a family on a low income. And soccer cleats and pots and a headboard…
That said, I have also been doing some looking on CL. I have been inspired to see what people do over on http://betterafter.blogspot.com/ Maybe something groovy will pop up that just begs for a redo. You never know.
That's wonderful that your community takes care of each other like that! And I enjoy Better After too, it's a great inpirational site. Stay tuned, I've got a few of those of my own in mind :)
We've given away loads of stuff for free on Craigslist as we slowly remodel our house: old vanities, brass light fixtures, old tupperware that was left by the previous owner, a banged up garage door, and so on. But the best thing we unloaded recently were two sofas without seat cushions! The sofas themselves were in good condition structurally, but the dogs had torn the seat cushions to pieces, making them unusable. They sat in our garage for over a year, but I hated throwing something in the landfill that someone might get some use out of. I posted them on Craigslist as a “let's just see if anyone is interested before we take them to the dump later on” and I was surprised to get a bunch of interested people in the sofas. A few days later they were gone!