For all the bad things that have come out of Craig's List, the site where people can sell just about anything, my wife and I have had really good luck on there. It obviously takes a little discernment to decipher exactly what is a good deal and what is a crock of you know what, but if you are looking for something and don't want to spend a lot of money on it, its definitely worth a peek. Over the past three years, my wife and I have bought numerous things off of Craig's List and have had really good luck with all of it. I think the first really good deal we found on Craig's List, which has just recently turned into a benefit for my business as well, is old, used brick. I know, doesn't sound like a great find, but if you try and buy old brick from a company, you will probably pay between $3 and $4 dollars a brick. The gentleman I got the brick from was selling them for $1 a brick. But wait, it gets even better. I got in touch with the guy and headed over to see what he had. There was an enormous pile behind his house and he said to take as much as I wanted. On top of that, he offered to let me use his antique, dump body pickup truck to transport them from his house to mine. I loaded them into the truck at the bottom of the hill behind his house, and unfortunately, the truck couldn't make it up the hill all loaded up. No big deal though. We dumped the brick, and he brought out his ATV with a little trailer and let me use it to cart them up to the truck that was now on top of the hill in his driveway. Talk about a generous person. He then let me drive his truck to my house while he stayed home, trusting that I would bring it back (which I obviously did). All told, I think I took about 800 brick out of his backyard. What was the total cost? I bartered with him and painted two ceilings that had some water stains on them. And the benefit to my business is that he just called me this week to get some work done on his house. That was perhaps the best deal that we have found on Craig's List so far. The guy was super nice, generous, and I had never met him before this transaction. Yet, there is more to the benefits we have found on Craig's List.
For those of you who don't know, my wife and I own 12 acres in the middle of the woods in the middle of Vermont. There is about a half acre clearing on our land that needs to be trimmed or mowed every time we go up there. To start with, I was using an actual trimmer with the blade attachment to cut through the thicker weeds that grow in the clearing. I didn't want to buy a lawnmower as it would probably get beat up and broken within a few uses. With the trimmer and the small blade attached, it would take me hours of painstaking, shoulder crunching swipes to get it trimmed down. Even then, it didn't look that good and there were plenty of spots that were missed. We needed something else to get the job done. So what did we do? We checked on Craig's List for a DR Trimmer, those beasts that have a 18" cutting width with no blades to bend and simple to replace the trimmer line. The cheapest one you find brand new is at least $600, way to much for us to spend. On Craig's List, however, we found a man selling one for $200, and his was a model that normally retails for about $800. I was a little skeptical, yet the deal sounded really good, so I headed up to his house to check it out and hopefully buy the trimmer. Well, it looked pretty much brand new when I got there and come to find out, he had only used it for one year before he moved and didn't have a use for it anymore. Along with the trimmer came all the extra trimmer line he had, plus some other parts, and of course, the manual. We got it home, and after putting some new gas in it and after a little tinkering to figure out how to get it to start, it fired right up and we have had no trouble with it for 2 years now. It now sits up in Vermont in our shed and is ready to go whenever we head up there. Another great deal that has turned into a great benefit for us. And that doesn't even conclude the things we have found on Craig's List. My wife also found her potter's wheel on the site. It was being sold by a lady who had no need for it anymore. The model she was selling went for about $1K dollars brand new. We ended up talking her down to $200 because the wheel needed a little bit of work to get it back to perfect working order. In the end, it didn't even cost us $20 dollars to fix it and my wife can now work on her ceramics at home.
No, I am not done yet. The last thing we bought on Craig's List, about a week ago, were four 55 gallon food grade plastic drums. Why did we buy these? Well, in an effort to conserve water, we want to put some rain barrels around the house to collect water from the gutters and utilize it both in our vegetable garden and for the flower gardens around the house. If you were to buy rain barrels online, the cheapest you could buy one for would be about a $100 dollars with some going up to $300 and $400 dollars a piece. Now, granted, these blue plastic drums don't look all fancy and nice, but they are paintable and they only cost $20 a piece, and we got four of them. Also, they need a little conversion to make them into rain barrels, but for about $40 I could transform all of them into rain barrels. I'd say that's quite the deal. I am quite sure that we are not done buying stuff from Craig's List. In fact, we are currently checking out the site for heavy duty metal shelving and possibly some too chests for my workshop. While nothing has materialized so far, there is plenty out there to choose from and to be frank, the timing isn't quite right on all of it. We almost got some shelves for a great price, but we didn't contact the person in time. Oh well, there will be more deals out there. So, in the end, would I recommend using Craig's List to find great deals on whatever you need? Absolutely. I wouldn't go there to find any services to use, but for products its fantastic. So for now, I will continue working on assembling our rain barrels and wait till we find our next great deal on Craig's List. (And no, they didn't pay me to write any of this, I just figured I would share my experiences of what we have bought and how it has worked out.)
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