The Power of Craigslist
Here’s a tip – use craigslist to get your yard work done for free.
Our backyard is beautiful, we can’t lie. Beautiful enought that we got married there. But with that craziness over, it’s not worth the trouble to maintain – trimming bushes, weeding gravel pathways, etc. Plus our ferocious eight pound puppy would appreciate more room to hunt bugs.
So, we’re making it all grass… beautiful, beautiful, already-have-the-mower-out-for-it-anyways grass.
Our first challenge was getting rid of all the stuff in the way – bushes, pathway, etc. And we hate to just throw all that stuff away, especially since I just put new pea gravel down 3 months ago for the wedding.
Enter craiglist. Sherry posted a listing Tuesday morning at 9:30 with this picture, offering the bushes for FREE. I never thought it’d work.
But by 10:30 our driveway was filling up with people armed with shovels and pick-axes. And when I got home from work there was barely anything left… except for a couple sweaty, shirtless strangers still digging. One guy even gave us 100 beans to steak his claim on six big bushes!
We repeated the experiment on Wednesday morning with the pea gravel. Sure enough, by that evening virtually all of it had been raked, shoveled and wheel-barrowed out of our yard. “Free” is definitely the universal language.
We didn’t lift a finger – except to deliver some water to aforementioned sweaty strangers – and now our yard looks a little bit ravaged, but a lot more ready for grass seed.
PS: We’re going to try to save the arch and move it elsewhere in the yard. We did get married under it, after all.
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Comments
Yeah, that’s the typical response. We loved our lush & manicured backyard, but all the care it needed to stay lush and manicured made it lots and lots of work (we’re talking about 30 hours a month!) so after making sure it looked perfect for our backyard wedding, it was time to say goodbye. Stay tuned for updated photos of our new green and grassy backyard- and thanks for the comment!
New comment on an old post (I just found your blog today & read the whole thing…..then saw the following during an unrelated Craigslist trawl…)
An ad for a rocking chair:
“Bonus – if you take this chair AND the two stupid fans that broke during the ginormous heatwave of recent memory, we will knock $10 off the price. Yes, the fans are broken.. we are clearly too lazy to take them to the dump. So if you have some place to put them.. say, perhaps, in a cannon that you plan to fire into the sun .. that would certainly be worth getting $10 less for the chair. It’s a long shot, but hey.. it’s out there. Rock on!”
Hi YHL!
Just wanted to comment on this old post to tell you that we took your advice on the Craigslist free labor. We were VERY skeptical at first, but are now firm believers. We bought our first home about 2 months ago. To say there is a lot of landscaping is an understatement! Over the past 2 weeks we’ve gotten bids from landscaping companys to remove most of it and put down grass. Bids ranged from $2500-$8000!!!(No Way) We posted the ad on Craigslist Saturday morning for free pea gravel and limestone rocks from the pond. As an added bonus we put that “ask about free plants and bushes”. Within the day about 40% of our landscaping was gone!!! We had 31 calls total. Anyways, we are now completely underway with out budget friendly landscaping remodel and couldn’t be happier. I am taking pics as we go and cannot wait to submit our first “Reader’s Redesign” to you when it’s all completed!
Eeek ! I loved it the way it was. Looked so nice. Guess I will have to stayed tuned for the grassy meadow version. You are brilliant with the Craig’s list idea …..I’ll keep that listed under kosher “bag of tricks”.