Craigslist and Me

I am a Craigslisting fool.  Pretty sure I can make that a verb. Just about every piece of furniture in our house is listed on Craigslist.  I field emails and texts from potential new owners of our stuff all day and well into the night.  In fact Craigslist is apparently a popular pastime around 11 pm.  Ideally it goes like this:  I post a picture, a price, and a brief description on Craigslist; people email me through Craigslist and ask (almost every single time) "Do you still have this chair/shelf/bed?," I email back that yes I do (which is why it is still listed) and give them my cell number to text me if they want to see it, they text, I give them an address, they come and buy my stuff.  Except the communication can break down at any time in that sequence.  People who express an initial interest through email may not follow up with a text.  Just because someone texted and seemed posed to be at my door that very evening, does not mean I will ever hear from them again, let alone actually succeed in selling them that chair/bed/shelf.

The garage is a constantly shifting stage.  I wish I had thought to do pictures. As I list things on Craigslist, we move furniture from each room of the house to the garage, so that we don't need to lead strangers through the house to look at the things we hope they will buy.  Our beds and dressers, bookshelves from every room in the house, the dining room table, couches, chairs, the basement fridge, each have taken their brief turn in the garage before they have been loaded into the pick up trucks of friends and strangers and taken away. Everyday we have fewer pieces of furniture in the house.

A sampling of my Craigslist experiences over the past two weeks:

The guy who decided against the used bed I was selling out of my garage because he "want(ed) something that would last a long time," and this one had some scratches in the paint job.  Well, he was right, it did.  It also was a fraction of the price of the same bed, unscratched, that he could probably find at a nice new furniture store, but this was a Craigslist sale, dude.

The guy who said he wanted my dresser, walked into my garage, handed me exactly what we had asked for it  and promptly loaded said dresser into his truck. Easiest sale ever.

The couple who stood on my porch discussing at length the flaws of my bookshelf which "looked darker and more like oak" in the picture and wasn't solid wood but a veneer.  He asked her multiple times "What do you think?  It's for your office?" And she kept saying "Hmmmm, I don't know, hmmmm."  Seriously, this same exchange at least three times before they decided against it.

The father and his young sons who bought a bunkbed and then proceeded to strap the various parts to the top of their very tiny car.

The elderly mother and daughter who came to buy a desk but also to chat at length about a variety of topics mostly irrelevant to the sale of said desk.

The little boy named Liam who came with his Dad to take apart and take away the play house and kept calling my Liam "Other Liam," and asking where Other Liam had gone and asking Other Liam to come find him.  The play house was one of our "free if you dissassemble and cart away" items, both of which were extremely popular, so Liam was here to play for quite awhile while his daddy and uncle and my husband and sons labored to take apart and load up that play house.

Mostly this getting rid of stuff has been a very gratifying experience.  It feels good to have less stuff. It does seem to me that up until now we have been focused on acquiring more and better things, and now we have suddenly about-faced and are focused instead on getting rid of all we have so carefully accumulated.  And we probably had (until about 3 weeks ago) nicer "stuff" than we have ever had. The couch I sold yesterday was seriously a really great couch.  But it was just a couch too.  And, it is fun to meet the little boy who will play in the play house that my kids won't use anymore.  It is fun to find a new home for our piano, which we did love, but which would do no one any good sitting in storage for one or two or ten years.  And every item that goes to a new home gets us a little bit closer to being able to travel unencumbered by excessive stuff.