One Man’s Trash…
One of the perks of living in an upper middle class neighborhood is the quality of ‘curb alert’ deals. If you aren’t familiar with curb alerts, they work something like this. A person drags something (usually furniture) out to the curb and then they place a free sign on it and/or online. Someone like us comes along and picks it up and either uses it personally or resells it. Everybody wins. The original person gets rid of it, someone else gets something nice, and perhaps a middle man makes a little money on the side.
So it didn’t come as too big of a surprise when I got a phone call from Shae telling me that there was a nice queen sized bed frame for grabs a few blocks away. Naturally, I was quite excited since our current sleeping arrangement for the past three years has consisted of a box spring on the floor with a mattress on top (yup, we’ve been sleeping on the floor since we moved in).
The headboard wouldn’t fit into our car, but the footboard, side rails, and middle support all did. An hour later and it was assembled in our bedroom.
We easily saved a few hundred dollars and for that amount of moolah, I am willing to look past the scratches and dings.
The bed frame alone was quite the find, but it seems that good things come in threes because today on our morning run we came across two more finds. The first was a heavy duty mirror that the owner was discarding because the top was separating from the bottom.
Some wood glue and a clamp are all that it needed to be like new.
The third find was a heavy duty coffee table.
We have been meaning to add a bench near our backdoor so we can sit down and take off our shoes without tromping through the house. After we add a few coat hooks above it, we will have a place to put our coats instead of just throwing them on the floor like last winter.
A long time ago when I was in high school and living with my parents my Dad came home with an 8′ length of gutter. He was going to install it over the front steps to keep water from splashing down on them. Naturally I asked, “Where did you find that?” as an 8′ length of gutter seemed to be an unusual find. Slightly flustered and possibly offended he retorted “I bought it”. I wonder if Frugal Boy will grow up with the same mindset as I did?
