How Craigslist has helped me make a House into a Home

Thanks to Craigslist, we now have a home for all our books! 

In my last post, I mentioned how overwhelmed I was upon moving into our first home.  We weren't able to do any painting or renovating before Move-In Day, so the whole experience was rushed.  All we were able to do was some basic cleaning and pulling up some carpeting in what is currently being used as our bedroom.

Weeks after moving in, I was starting to get more comfortable, but there were still a couple of things preventing our house from feeling like a home to us.  One was that in a couple of rooms, there were still stacks of boxes that we couldn't unpack, because we didn't have anywhere to put their contents.  Specifically, boxes full of books and our China.

I quickly learned that buying a large bookcase brand new was going to cost a lot of money.  We weren't prepared to spend hundreds of dollars on a large piece of furniture just yet, so I started scouring Craigslist for something.  On a morning over Labor Day weekend, a listing popped up for a really nice, large, real wood bookcase.  They had it custom-built for their home, but when I measured the walls in our office, I saw that it would fit perfectly on one of the walls.  More importantly, they were only asking $50 for it!  They actually had two of them, but only one would fit in our office.  

After checking it out in person, we knew it'd be the perfect solution for our Boxes O'Books, so we scheduled a time to come back with a U-Haul to pick it up.  The U-Haul rental was actually more expensive than the bookcase itself, but we knew we needed to rent a truck at some point to go back to our old apartment to pick up some outdoor furniture we left in the garage and both locations were close to one another, so it was a good time to tackle that chore.

We came home and I immediately began unpacking all of those boxes and now you can see the floor in the office (I can see in this photo that the carpet needs to be shampoo'd)!

Other side of the room - with a cat in his tree

Another thing that was preventing our house from feeling like a home to me was not having anywhere to host guests.  We had a large dining table that we brought with us from my Husband's Grandparents, but we didn't have any chairs for it.  We wanted to be able to invite people over, so we started looking for dining chairs and almost fell over when we saw some of the prices.  I mean, $200 for a single chair that only gets sit on once a week (if that) seems exorbitant.  We needed 8-10 chairs (the table seats 10) and our max budget was $1,000 for all the chairs.  It became clear that this approach was not going to work.

I knew after a weekend of visiting different stores and coming up with nothing, that second-hand was going to be the way to go.  I checked both Craigslist and Ebay for a little over a week, when on my morning train ride to work, a posting popped up from someone in my area selling a beautiful cherry wood dining set.  It included a large dining table (with a leaf) with 8 matching chairs (two of which had arms), as well as a China cabinet, for $1200.  I had originally asked the seller if she'd consider selling us just the chairs, but then I realized that the chairs were too large/wide for the dining table we inherited from family and also, the chairs and table were meant to go together (we just didn't have room for the china cabinet).  We checked the table and chairs out in person and I offered her a little more than half ($650) for them and she accepted!  We borrowed a friend's truck and brought home our beautiful new dining table and chairs set for $650!  Way under our $1,000 budget, for chairs, alone.

Here they are in our Dining Room (sorry about the sun-squares):

A few scratches, but nothing terrible!

Just check out those legs!

Here is it without the leaf:

And there's one more thing Craigslist is responsible for in our house - our first piece of granite in our Kitchen!

Since we don't yet have a china cabinet, I had a ton of glasses that needed a place to stay.  I was so tired of pulling them out of their boxes every time I had company over.  I had this wall in the Kitchen on the Dinette side that had a small bookshelf there for a bit for extra storage, but I wound up moving it to the Living Room, since I needed storage there, too.  For a few weeks, this wall was blank and I had been searching for a Baker's Rack, because I knew it was the perfect place for one.  But holy moly are they expensive!  

Then, one morning on Craigslist, a beautiful granite and wrought iron Baker's Rack popped up with an even more beautiful price tag of $75.  Apparently, we were the first people to call about it and to come see it.  We borrowed my Father-In-Law's Van in case we liked it and sure enough, she came home with us and now lives in our Dinette, holding most of our beautiful wine glasses!  

The granite slab alone was probably 50 lbs.  It's such a nice addition to our Kitchen, especially since we looooove wine!

These are just a few reasons why I love me some Craigslist!

Happy Living!