Cheapskate

Ready to learn something about me? Here goes - I have NEVER, not once, "invested" in a piece of furniture. In other words - every single item in my home was ridiculously, insanely cheap. And, I'm pretty proud of that.

A quick rundown of a few key pieces -
- Our 8ft solid wood dining room table with 6 chairs was found on craigslist for $300. A friend that has the same set told me he paid over $1,000 for it in store.
- Our couch is from the RoomPlace Outlet and cost a whopping $200.
- Every piece of furniture in both our office and extra bedroom is from Ikea, along with the dressers in our bedroom.
- The current entryway table was $10 on craigslist.
- The coffee table (which I still need new glass for), was $20 in the as-is section at Pier 1.
- All of our kitchen appliances are from the Sears Outlet. The dishwasher, fridge, stove and microwave are all stainless steel... and cost $1,300 TOTAL. Girls I work with have spent more than that on an oven alone.
- The cabinet in the dining room that holds my platters and cookbooks was found in the alley across from my parent's house.

Get the idea?

Now while I understand that this kind of "budgeting" may not work for everyone, and eventually I assume we will have to or want to actually invest in, say, a really nice couch, for now our major deal hunting is working for us.

SO, you can imagine my excitement when I found this handy little website that allows for image-based searching on my dear friend Craigslist.

PicClick works just like the standard Craigslist site, letting you search by area, keyword and/or price, but instead of your search results being a long list of post titles that you click on individually, you simply get a  grid of pictures so you can see without any time wasted that the "Antique Table" someone is selling is actually a little kid's play table.

Apologies for this post lacking pretty pictures, but here's hoping this tool will come in handy for others that live by the "one person's trash is another's treasure" motto!