Sorry, posted this on the wrong post…

Here in London I have made excellent use of freecycle: people came and took away some old clothes, some spare copies of magazines, our bread bin and many other odds and ends and in return we collected 2 chest of drawers, a full length mirror (without frame – so we really need some ideas about where to put it), an original steamer trunk which we are using as a coffee table and some photo frames.

I think gardens look best when they are well used and loved, whatever they look like. If manicured gardens (if you can call them that) took too much maintenance I think a large lawn is just as fab – and more space for croquet and childrens games if and when they come…

Burger is adorable. I heart Burger. And your yard looks great.

I discovered your blog a couple weeks ago and the timing couldn’t have been better as I am about to embark on some major painting and room redecorating projects. This has been a great source of tips and ideas! Thanks!

I would say that about 2/3 of my house has been furnished from craigslist: the beautiful west elm mirror for $25 (still sells for $149 on the website), the Room and Board sectional for $640 (original price exceeds $2,000), my set of 4 white OH! chairs for for less than the cost of 1. Come to think of it, I found my house on craigslist! All of my kitchen appliances too!

Needless to say, I am a fan of your often inexpensive decor picks. :)

Here is my craigslist story – My husband and I curbed a pool table (some peeps got evicted and we went through their junk) – threw it in the truck – dumped it in the garage – through the miracle of craigslist – sold it for $600. the. next. day.

same thing happened with a bidet – scored a free $35 – only it was kinda gross to think that we were handling a used bathroom fixture :)

Gotta love CL. love this post – can’t wait to hear what others say!

I discovered that you can even find husbands on CL!

We’ve been able to sell a ton of stuff on there though, giving us extra money to buy new things!

We needed to get out of a lease in North Carolina to move to Texas. If we broke the lease we’d incur almost as much in fees as we would have to spend to just pay for the rest of the lease. So we listed the place on CL, and we found someone to take over the rest of the lease for us. He got a great deal on a beautiful place to live (rent had gone up tremendously in the area, but we were still locked in at a lower price), and we got out of the lease with a total cost of $0!

When we moved in our first house, we found two dozens of mason jars filled with UNKNOWN ingredients in basement. Obviously previous owner canned something a long time ago… We were scared, didn’t even bother opening them. ;)

We had a couple of other things we wanted to get rid of, so we posted all of them for free on craigslist.

Believe or not, we got 7-8 replies for the mason jars right away! LOL. That was the first thing sold among several items we posted on CL.

I scored an art deco walnut veneer dressing table on freecycle – it’s so beautiful that 2 years on I still get a thrill when I walk in the guest room & look at it!

I found my wedding photographer on Craigslist! She had years of experience doing wedding photography as part of a firm, but when she left to start her own business, she had to start her portfolio from scratch because all of her previous photos belonged to her old firm. She was already going to do the photos for a few hundred dollars (a *STEAL* for wedding photography here in Chicago), but I told her I had some experience in web design and offered her a website for her budding business. So, bartering a website for wedding photography, I got my fabulous professional wedding photographer for free!

I used CL to find a place to live in Boston while in grad school. My fiance and I have used it to get rid it of furniture/appliances that we don’t need. And if my brother in law doesn’t come pick up some large landscaping rocks we have left over from a fish pond that broke, I’m putting those on CL as well.

I think you should know that you have misnamed your dog =). If you check these websites, you will find that the LOLcat and LOLdog community have established that burgers are for kittehs and hotdogs (drumroll) are for doggies. Perhaps you could adopt a kitteh and name it Hotdog!

icanhascheezburger.com
ihasahotdog.com

Oh, yes, I’ve scored a million and one great things at yardsales, but just last weekend, I got a freebie while yardsaling. A really gorgeous outdoor fountain which I’ll be setting up next spring along with a little landscaping project. I posted it on my Monday’s post this week if anyone wants to peek!

I came here to let everyone know about Freecycle, but someone beat me to it! I’ll just reiterate: Freecycle is GREAT. A little more involved than CL in that you have to join and abide by the rules, which are simple, but you can find some amazing stuff (if you’re fast!) on there AND get rid of things lickety-split. What you can’t do, though, is do a cattle-call for anything you want to freecycle — but you would be surprised what people will give and take on there. Keeping things out of the landfill, if at all possible, is the name of the game. I used it in Richmond many times with great success. Anyway, hope it inspires some people to check it out.

http://www.freecycle.org

holy frig .. such a simply great idea!!! I am in BIG/good trouble finding you two :)

Oh, and you can try http://www.freecycle.org/. It’s a network of folks wanted to give their stuff away free to a good home.

I *heart* your site and your style — you’ve been inspiring me!

I took your advice and posted on CL free landscaping shrubs and within 30 min. someone was calling begging me to save them for her. I even reminded her that she had to dig them up and she was so excited to be getting 34 FEET of free shrubs that she didn’t care. We’ll see tomorrow how excited she is when she and her hubby have to dig them up.

Thanks for the great ideas! Oh, and I think I’m in need of a major makeover from you guys…..I’m still mulling it over.

Thanks again for the great reading! :-)

I once had rocks that kept getting in the way of my grass mowing. Some one on craigslist went all over my yard digging them up. Some other guy came around asking for them. All gone I said. Turned out that they were landscaping rocks and worth fifty cents a pound :(

A tenant up and left leaving the entire (crappy) contents of a unit. I posted 100 pictures of it on craigslist and after a couple of pickers, a family new to canada brought the garbage bags and almost emptied the place. After the last few knick knacks dissapeared, I only needed to get rid of 3 garbage bags to the land fill.

I made a *really* bad patio out of shipping pallets. They were so ugly, and it was time to get rid of it. Somebody took nine broke pallets for fire wood. Soo much work for useless pallets!

The free section of craigslist has run it’s course unfortunately as I find it better to just take it to the good will…..

I moved to DC 7 years ago and have gotten every job and rental I’ve had up here from an ad on craigslist. But on freecycle, I once got a car! My boss had told me that I needed a car for my job or he’d have to let me go. Luckily a woman posted an ad wanting to donate her non-working car to a charity. I sent her an email asking her to consider my plight if she didn’t have a charity contact her.

She did, and gave the car to me!

Turns out it needed a transmission which at the dealer would have cost $5K! So, I picked one up at a friend’s wrecking yard. I brought the car and transmission to a mechanic (who I found on CL), He fixed the car and got it ready for emissions, and cleared the safety check… Total bill including the rebuilt tranny, $1720.00.

A few months later my company lost a HUGE client, and I was a casualty in the layoffs.

So, I sold the car for $3400!

Hey Sherry,

We just bought our first home knowing that we would need to put in new cabinets and appliances. However that meant we needed to tear out the old ones and haul them away. We are working with Home Depot and they were going to charge us like $700 or something just to tear out our old cabinets.

I ended up putting up our appliances on craigslist and a real estate agent who also rents out some apartments on the side bought them. I remembered what you said in regards to free labor on CL so I told him we’d also be putting up our cabinets on CL soon but if he wanted them he could have first dibs. He ended up buying them AND completely tearing them out for us.

So he basically paid us to tear out our cabinets for us. Good deal! I didn’t advertise for him to tear them out because you don’t want just anyone to do that. But since I knew he was reputable, I “offered” it to him! :-)

Thanks for the tip!

Jessica

I love freecycle & CL. I lost many so many plants and small shrubs due to VOLES(horrible little critters that feed on roots). I posted my dilemma on freecycle asking if anyone would share some plants with me from their garden and offered to do the digging. I was overwhelmed with the response. In turn, I met some great folks that I could help out with some furniture and kids clothes that we no longer needed. I’m so happy that I found your blog – wonderful ideas and inspiration! Thanks, Page

Hi Sherry,

I love love love your blog and in fact reference it in my blog all of the time. I also write a green home remodeling column for an online magazine in Los Angeles called Your Daily Thread. I just came across your post here and thought I’d share a similar story I wrote for them. Thanks for your blog!

http://yourdailythread.com/2009/07/28/green-home-remodel-part-three-ditch-the-dumpster/