The Free Sofa

Recently my wife spotted a sofa sleeper for free on Craigslist. We wanted one for the guest bedroom so we drove my old Ford truck the 40 miles to the little town where it was located. “It will be a fun little drive in the country,” she said. That didn’t sound so bad, and the sofa was priced right. We made the drive and after loading it up we stopped at a convenience store for a glass of ice for the warm bottle of water we had in the truck and a slice of pizza that we split because we had not eaten yet that day. Heading back down the highway we got about 5 miles out of town when something began to smell hot. The truck began shaking and losing power. We were just able to turn off of the highway onto a gravel road when it died. Once we rolled to a stop we hopped out and looked under the hood. What greeted us was smoke pouring out of the valve cover. I commented that this free sofa wasn’t free anymore.

It was a bright sunny day, in the 90’s and humid. Looking around us as far as we could see were waving green corn fields without a tree in site. After placing a call to AAA we stretched a blanket across the windshield to create some shade and waited. And waited. The flies were biting, the sweat was trickling and there was nothing to do but watch the corn swaying in the fields. I observed that if we were stuck out there after dark at least we had the sofa to sleep on.

The shop assigned to handle the remote area we were in was very busy and we ended up waiting two and a half hours for the tow truck to arrive. We had just drunk the last of our water when the driver showed up. He was sympathetic about our situation and invited us to wait in his air conditioned truck cab while he loaded our truck, with the free sofa still strapped in the back, onto his flatbed truck. As he hopped into the cab to drive us home we both grimaced as he somehow pegged the scenario perfectly. “Let me guess,” he said, “you got a really good deal on that sofa on Craigslist.”

Related Reading:

How I Sell on Craigslist

Is AAA Worth It?

Can You Really Find Good Free Stuff On Craigslist?

How I Sell on Craigslist

Craigslist, started in San Francisco in 1995 as a hobby by Craig Newmark, is today a 12 billion page views per month behemoth. The online classified ads and forums site publishes more than 30 million new classified ads each month. Check their Q & A for more interesting facts.

I have been using craigslist for about a year now and they have been the best online money maker for me so far. When I first began using them they provided an additional income stream for a hauling endeavor, but now they are used to continually clean unwanted items out of my house.

If you have not used them yet but would like to try it out I would suggest signing up for an account with them, rather than just posting, and using an email address exclusively for craigslist. I use gmail. Using that designated email address helps me keep my craigslist dealings separate from my other email. Having an account also means you will be able to keep a history of what and when you have posted, and makes it much easier to repost if your item does not sell the first time.

No matter what the item is I always include a photo of it with my ad. I think people are much more interested in an item they can see. I set up in my basement a little “studio” on top of an old light table with three foot double fluorescent lights hanging above it. A few different color sheets can be hung from the wall behind it and draped over the light table to serve as a homemade background, and the lighting from above and below highlight the item to be photographed in a uniform manner. When I first started posting items for sale I would just set them on the couch or living room floor and click away. I soon decided on the mini studio because it offers a much cleaner, uncluttered approach that focuses exclusively on the item to be photographed. A digital camera is a must. I have a digital SLR that I could use but I prefer my little Kodak Easy Share 5.0. If I had very small items to sell, such as jewelry, I would use the SLR, but most of what I have been selling has been larger than that so the little Kodak works well for me.

Once I photograph the product I write down everything I can think of to describe it, and then measure it. Size, color, material, condition, manufacturer or brand, and any history I might know about it. Then it’s back upstairs to the computer and eBay to help me figure out a price. If I can find the item there I will average out the price and then knock off around a third. Craigslist users are looking for bargains, and I have plenty of stuff to get rid of. Pricing items too high will usually ensure you will continue to own it.

One rookie move I made was to post items too frequently, because I had so much stuff initially to get rid of. Folks would get irritated at seeing the same things over and over and began flagging me, and if enough people flag your ad it gets removed. It didn’t happen a lot of times, but enough to tell me to slow down and space out the frequency of my ads.

I have a few rules I stick to when dealing with customers. I will not ship and I only accept cash. I have met people at public locations a few times, usually because they are from out of town, but the vast majority just come to my house. I usually meet them on my porch with the item in hand. Some like to chat, but most just exchange a few pleasantries, pay me and are on their way. After over 1,000 ads posted I have run into maybe three potential scammers. They have been easy to detect so far, usually because of the crazy grammar and unusual requests they make. Here is an example email I saved: “I am interested,what is the last offering price? and i am travelling out of state tommorrow to united kingdom for a church conference,let me have your address and phone number,ican arrange for the pick up when the payment is done i stayed in Colorado,i will contact my financier to send the money order to you as payment so let have the details in which the payment will be issue,waiting to read from you soon.” He never did read from me.

After much experimenting I have come to the conclusion that Friday is the best day to post my ads. I get the most replies and actual pick ups from Friday and, interestingly, maybe half of the email replies I receive on Fridays have a business suffix in the address. I will get a flurry of replies on Friday, less on Saturday and hardly any on Sunday. During the following week I will receive maybe one to three more.

The only frustration I encounter with selling on craigslist is the no show. Maybe a third of the people that contact me will set a date and time for pick up and then not show up. I used to follow up with them the next day to maybe set another time, but stopped doing that because they would usually just burn me again.

Things that do not sell after several attempts will either get posted as free or donated to Salvation Army or Goodwill.

To wrap this up I will give an example of some things I have sold and for how much. Your junk is someone else’s treasure!

Small list: Throw Pillows $16, Watches $10, Cabbage Patch Doll $15, Hanging Coat Racks $10 for both, Kennedy Painting $10, Bowling Balls (3) $20, Shelves $10, Charger Plates $10, Longaberger Basket $15, Hello Kitty Items $25, Bed Frame $20, Outside Toys $18, Old Newspapers $50, Software $20, Pampered Chef Items $70, Old Computers $30, Fence Posts $33, Pottery Bowls $15, Dorm Fridge $40, Playstation 2 & 14 games, $150, Little House Books (7) $20, Bean Bag Chair $10, Food Saver $50, Jeans (3) $30, Heavy Duty Folding Tables (3) $45, Shirts & Sweatpants (9) $50, Small Bookshelf $15, Fishing Poles (3) $65, Two Wood Buckets $25, Boom Box $10, Makita Circular Saw $20.


Have you sold on craigslist? Do you have any tips or advice to share?

Cleaning Up And Moving On

We had been ambushed by the last job. The clean-out of the duplex left us with little profit, filled up our storage space and wreaked havoc with our income stream. We could not bring any more loads to Toby’s double garage, since it was full of the junk storm. (See previous post)

Focusing on the massive amount of items in the garage became a priority. Tote after tote, box after box, we sorted through it and gradually made progress while also filling up both of his garbage cans every week. Toby was not interested in the selling side of the operation, so I became very familiar with Craigslist and began to take a truckload at a time from his garage to my house to sort and sell. Sellable items were categorized, photographed and posted for sale on Craigslist, while filling up a spare bedroom in my house. We ended up making three times as much from selling off the junk storm than we made from hauling it.

We were still advertising our hauling services on Craigslist and continued to receive inquiries. One potential customer wanted us to clear out one of his mini-storage units. It was full of items we thought we could sell, but we had no place to haul them to and store. We turned the job down. You can not turn down jobs and make money.

Then the other shoe dropped. Toby had to get a real job. We were not making enough with hauling for him to support his family. He wanted to expand the hauling business, buy a building and bigger trucks and the whole bit. I was looking at it as more of an experiment to bring in some side cash. He was in a different financial situation than me so were viewing the operation from very different vantage points. Toby went back to work and I continued pursuing other ideas.

Eventually the garage was cleaned out. Toby is still working, but everything is in place if we decide to haul again. Most enjoyable of the whole experience was being able to work closely with my nephew. We also liked the satisfaction of getting a job by advertising our services, doing the work well and making the customer happy. Getting paid was okay, too.

If we should ever do it again we have decided on a new policy: take the loads to the dump, sort through them there, and keep only the items we might be able to sell. Brilliant!

Next up: my experiences with surveys and reward sites.

The Perfect Junk Storm

The hauling business was going great. We were moving appliances, furniture and household items from one place to another as well as just hauling away stuff people didn’t want anymore. As described in the previous post we were getting paid to haul, selling the nicer items on Craigslist, and selling clothes at a local consignment shop.

December of 2007 slowed down considerably, being cold and snowy and close to Christmas. Not much hauling at this point, but still plenty of items from previous jobs to sort through in Toby’s garage and clean and sell on Craigslist.

Then it came. A clean out request from the owner of a duplex. It was now January in Iowa, and the owner had seen our ad on Craigslist and called Toby. It was urgent, he said, to get this place cleaned out and back on the market. Could we help? Toby went to visit the duplex and gave a bid. Another hauler had bid less, but the owner really liked Toby’s attitude. Could Toby match the other, lesser bid? If so, he would sure like to hire us. Toby said yes, and we were hired.

We showed up a couple days later to do the job and walked through the duplex. The renters had skipped out, taking their essentials and leaving basically a full house behind. Our bid had been based on the amount of pickup truckloads it would take us to clean the place out. After the first two pickup loads it became very apparent that there was no way this was going to happen with our two trucks and in one day. The owner was showing the duplex to prospective renters that night and we had told him we could handle it. What to do?

We decided the only way out was to get a bigger truck. Off to the local U-Haul where we rented a 14 foot truck. Back to the duplex where for the rest of the afternoon we worked on the clean out. The basement was the worst. The previous renters had accumulated so many clothes that they had to store them in gigantic totes. We took turns up and down those stairs, carrying the giant totes, boxes and miscellaneous junk.

Into the U-Haul truck it all went, including two washers, a dryer, a huge couch, kitchen table, chairs, small tables, dishes, the entire contents of the duplex. Finally, the U-Haul was full, from top to bottom, front to back. It was packed so full we had to struggle to pull the back door down. But the duplex was still not empty, and the landlord called to tell us he was on the way over with the prospective new renters. I backed my truck up and we finished the job filling it up, while the landlord was showing the duplex to some people that were eyeing us and the situation rather suspiciously.

The job totaled three pickup truck loads and a packed to the gills 14’ U-Haul. He paid us the $200 we had WAY underbid for the job. Minus $100 for the U-Haul this backbreaking job brought us each a whopping $50 each. There was no way we could just take all of this stuff to the dump. We had to keep it, sort through it and sell what we could to recoup at least the cost of the U-Haul. We drove the perfect junk storm over to Toby’s double garage, unloaded it and stood there staring at a now packed garage, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into and how to begin getting out.

First Attempts

I worked for over 18 years for the same employer for pretty good pay. Like many of us I hung on, year after year, figuring at least I was paying the bills and, yawn, saving up some money.

I got along well with my coworkers and my boss. My job with customer service and administration had been very fast paced and stressful. When I took an IT position it turned out to be a boring, behind the scenes job. I was ready for a change, but not one I would make all on my own. Then came the news that we were being outsourced. Read the previous post for that story.

Once it was over, I had to decompress from the 9 to 5 routine. It was strange at first not getting up to go to work. Then it was really nice. Then it got boring. It was now in the fall of 2007 and I needed to figure out what I was going to do.

My nephew Toby came over for a visit one night and we brainstormed about what we could do together to make some cash. It had to be something with almost zero overhead and start-up costs. We both had pickup trucks, and I had discovered craigslist.org. The light bulb went off! Let’s use the trucks we already have and advertise on craigslist to provide hauling services.

I went to the website for our landfill to find out what they accepted and what they charged for dumping to give us an idea of what to charge our customers. We decided that in most cases we would just double what the dump charged. We now had a quote sheet.

I wrote up some short, to the point ad copy and got a free Gmail account with the name of our service as the address (ourservice@gmail.com). I opened a free account with Craigslist using the gmail address as our email contact and Toby’s
cell number as our phone contact. He would take any phone calls and I would handle the email inquiries. We would split all costs and profits 50/50. We were ready. I posted the first ad on craigslist and we waited for a response.

It came pretty quickly, and within a few weeks we were scheduling several jobs a week. We noticed right away that occasionally people wanted us to get rid of some pretty nice stuff along with the junk. Usually they were tired of looking at it and just wanted it all gone, the good with the bad. We decided that what ever we didn’t keep personally we would store in Toby’s double garage to sell…on craigslist! I got another Gmail address, took some photos of our newly acquired treasures and began to post them. We were now selling online. We would also come across boxes, sacks and totes full of clothes. We sorted them out, opened an account with a local consignment shop and began taking the nicer clothes there while donating the rest to Goodwill or Salvation Army. We now had three streams of income and had reduced our landfill expenses by making fewer trips. This was working great! Too bad we didn’t see what was looming in front of us, just waiting to mess up our system.

Next: The Perfect Junk Storm