Purchasing goods using craig and his list

I originally started this blog to share some helpful money saving tips, my thoughts on being a cheapskate and also write about my day to day personal stuff.  I've hit the personal stuff pretty hard recently so it's time to be Mr. Helpful and share some pro-tips for scoring on craigslist (HEYYYYOOOOOO - Perhaps the phrasing on that is a bit misleading, though the same principals may apply).

As great as craigslist is, it has it's drawbacks.  Any free site is going to attract scammers and spammers, so that is a given.  It also really limits your search radius to what it considers your other nearby craigslists, sometimes that's helpful and others it's not.  I live in an area that is lucky enough to have it's own specific craigslist site, but that doesn't mean the "market" is so large here that I never have to search other craigslist regions depending on what I'm looking for.

Being awesome:  A case study
My leaf vacuum was a recent craigslist find, one of my best to date.  A leaf vacuum is somewhat specialized enough that you're going to have to cast a wide net to find what you're looking for.  I found this one a few hours away, corresponded with the seller over a period of time and in the end he even delivered it to me.

A few things that really worked to my benefit were:

• Motivated seller:  He no longer had any use for it after moving.
• There were some missing parts, I was able to quote the cost of replacement parts and whine about how it's not all there to negotiate a better deal.
• Early and often:  I started looking early enough so that timeline wasn't a problem.  If I had waited until now that the leaves were falling I'd have a lot more competition and would have paid a lot more.  
• Blind luck:  The seller travels a lot, and he just happens to head up my way on a weekly basis, give or take.

I ended up paying $400 for a machine that was used approximately 5 times and looked brand new, and while it was technically incomplete, $45 worth of parts was all I needed to make it, and me, whole again.  Retail on these bad boys is about $1200 and a comparable used ones, going by other craigslist ads, were in the $800+ range.  Awwwwwww yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee [muffins]!

Get by with a little help from your friends

In this wonderful technologically advanced age we live in, there are some tools to help a brotha out.  Personally I use Craigslist Search Helper (CSH), an extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari web browsers.  There are other options as well, but this one is my favorite so far.  It basically sits "on top" of craiglist, formats it a little differently, and adds a bunch of nice features to make navigating and searching craigslist much easier.

A lot of fish in the sea

You may need to broaden your horizons and leave your mom's basement and search a larger area.  CSH does exactly that, allowing you to put exactly how far you're willing to travel that's not limited to what craigslist considers your nearby regions.

Early bird gets the worm

CSH lets you set up search alerts to run every XX minutes/hours/days so that you can keep on top of whatever you're looking for.  Your browser needs to be open, and the alerts seem specific to the computer you have the extension installed on.  I may be missing an option to create an account and logon to that so it would work over multiple computers, but I haven't really looked for it, either.  When it finds new stuff you haven't looked at yet, it will pop up a little alert.

Zen and the art of helpful stuff

CSH makes the craigslist results more helpful by allowing you to mouseover the ads to read the text, view pictures, flag as spam, set a flag that you want to follow up with that, and even take notes all without even clicking into the ad.  

And I thought we were friends *harumpf*

The downside to all this is that CSH injects ads in it's layouts and overall it's "skin" for craiglist is not really that great to look at, but since we're all flawed in some way or other I've decided we're still going to go to prom together.

Bring forth into my RSS reader, peasant!

An alternative to CSH I've used in the past is the website crazedlist.org.  It's a bit clunky, you have to use Firefox (after making a change in the hidden browser settings), but one options is that you can save your search as a .OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader.  This was is pretty nice in that you can set it up in Google Reader, for instance and from any computer that has internet you can check to see if there are new ads.  

I find myself using the RSS method for long-term searches that I be creepin' on, and CSH on a daily basis to browse around craiglist and do my "Hmmmmm I wonder what kind of XYZs are for sale within 100 miles of her" type stuff.  

Slow thy role

Do you remember that time that I told you a story about my lawn mower not working and I heroically wrestled it back from death's cruel grasp (and dude, my arms look so cut while I was doing it)?  Yea, well this time, the next day, I was the cruel mistress raining down misfortune upon it - what a whacky turn of events, reader!  This is why I can't have nice things.

Last Friday we (Adam) had some company at the house after I got home from work so I thought it would be an excellent time to start being a doer and do some stuff that required doing in regards to my leaf vacuum or "leafpocalypse" setup.  Really, the last piece of the puzzle was that I needed to cut the mower deck boot to fit on, well, the mower deck (duh).  In some startling turn of events, I cut it and got it properly mounted exactly as planned without any major problems.  Surely I should have should have had some alarms of This is going way too easy, Mr. Guy going off in my head, but instead I felt smugly smug with myself and rode off back to the shed where the second half to this project was waiting for me.

I got the hose mounted up to the mower deck, the hose clamp all clamped down, and I was ready to go.  I hooked up the trailer to the hitch point, and slowly crept forward mowing and sucking and mulching leaves for a solid 10 minutes.  Amber can attest my next mistake:  Grinning, bouncing, and other outward acts of joy and pride only a father (of a leaf vacuum project) can feel in his heart.  That heart, ladies and gentleman, was about to be broken just like my mower.  It was a young and foolish early-fall romance, if we're assigning labels here, it wasn't meant to be.

Needless to say the mower came to a slow crawl and refused to move forward or backward.  The engine was still running, but it strained as it tried to move.  "Well, shit" said the author of this blog.  In my haste to mow/suck/mulch, I foolishly put the brake on, that I never use no less, and I had been riding around the yard for 10 minutes riding the brake.  "Double shit" soon followed as well as feeling like an enormous dumb guy.

To make things as entertaining as possible for everyone who isn't me, I had to drag the tractor back to the shed with the four wheeler, stopping every 5 feet or so to adjust the steering wheel on the tractor to dodge the mine fields of trees and other solid objects.  And when I say drag, I mean that word that I said I meant.  The rear wheels were locked up even with the transmission disengaged it wouldn't budge.  By the time I got it in the shed it was dark so feeling defeated, I packed it in for the evening.

Now that I have you on the edge of your seat Imma ruin it for you:  The brake was just locked up, no catastrophic transmission failure that I was worried about.  I've since disconnected the brake, as I've said, I never use it other than to try and ruin my life, and we were once again in business.  I made a few passes in the back yard and booyah, leaf and grass all up ins:

Important life lesson:  Never be happy or excited about any project you take on, because you already made a whole lot of mistakes that will come back to Wanye-Brady-Choke-a-Bitch you.  With that in mind, this is a close approximation of my emotion level having my leaf cleanup infinitely easier this season:

Let's be honest, you only come here for my impeccable taste in animated .gifs anyway.

In other updates, I got the dishwasher project finished up last night and spent a lot of money on a new snowblower which will virtually guarantee that we don't get any snow this year.  So either way, probably a good buy!

Projectus Maximus

Today, I am humbly blogging from the bottom of a figurative avalanche of projects that are threatening to snuff me out and/or force me into making a decision of who to eat first. It seems every time I start on something I want to do, it involves fixing something else along the way, not to mention taking away time from squishing Adam's cheeks.

Last weekend I tasked myself with installing our new(er) dishwasher we bought from some friends to replace our old-but-still-working dishwasher. Immediately you can see the problem in this, there wasn't anything technically wrong, and yet I thought it would be a good idea to fix it. I've been petitioning the Oxford people to reconsider the new definition for "fix"

fix [fiks] verb, fixed or fixt, fix·ing, noun  To make things worse in every way, you big dumb fat dumby face

First of all, removing the old dishwasher was much harder than I thought it would be, it eventually took a large crow-bar to pry the one side up enough to free it from it's wooden tomb. Unfortuantely that was just the beginning.  The old unit ran off a standard oulet plug, the newer unit was hard wired. Not wanting to smash up the wall to hard wire it I bought an electrical cord to wire it up. Inconvenient, but not a day-ender.

Where I'm stuck now is the plumbing, after the shutoff for the supply line there are a bunch of weird adapters, where I thought it was going to hook up was incorrect, so I now need to find a very specialized fitting, or man up and do some cutting and torching and soldering. I've hit my comfort limit so that's where it currently sits.

Last night, finding a bit of free time, I thought I'd try and mow the lawn. Our tractor has had a hard time starting lately but I figured I could eventually coax it to life as I have in the past. Once my coaxing skills ran out, I pushed it from our shed over to the garage where I worked on it for the next hour and a half, eventually finding the problem.  Seems that some of my furry rodent friends made a nest underneath one of the engine covers and ate half of the ignition wire.  Since I can't replace just the wire, I "fabricated up" (whenever I refer to something like this, run) a healthy portion of electrical tape to temporarily solve the problem.

As luck would have it, by the time I finished up it was too dark to mow. While it's great the tractor is now running, the real work has just begun since I still need to mount up my mower deck to the leaf vacuum I bought last month.  That is the most important project I need to work on this weekend by far because

The leaves: they are coming.

My tentative project list for the moment:

• Get the riding mower and leaf vacuum to make sweet leaf-mulching love so I can:
• "Prepare my anus" for the upcoming leafocaust and general yard work that should be done.  
• Get the plumbing sorted for the dishwasher, cut some scrap wood to get the dishwasher to the proper height (it sits a bit low).  Pray to Cascade, the dishwashing god, that I haven't messed anything else up.
• Leaf-blow the gutters out at least every other week until it stops raining.
• Speaking of gutters, I really need to install two more downspouts.  You know, another thing I don't know how to do.
• Wrangle up a large number of able-bodied men to help me remove my wood burning insert from our fireplace.  This weighs many hundreds of ell bee esses.  
• Get the pellet stove mostly in place, figure out what I need to connect it to my chimney.
• Install new top on the Miata (I've only been putting this off for almost two years).

The man, the myth, the weeee wittle wegend

On 9/9/11 our little man, Adam Scott Dreese, was brought into our world by a crack team (in this context crack means good, not referring some professional league of drug users) team of belly-slicing doctors with rapidly approaching tee times (this implies that doctor's play golf and they did it so fast I can only assume they needed to change into their spikes and abscond to the links post haste with the mayor of Senatorville).

Adam, aka Little Dude Cutesy McSqueezyCheeks would even out a scale with  8lbs 5oz of pure, uncut awesomeness on the other side and took up 21 vertical inch units of space.  His favorite pastimes are long limb-flails on the beach and watching his favorite sports team, the Williamsport Can't See Much Yets.

So far we've been home for two weeks and things are going well.  We're slowly getting the hang of the cry-eat-sleep-poop cycle, which can be a tough nut to crack.  Amber is simultaneously enjoying her time off work as well as wishing I could teleport home to give her a break now and then, while my transition coming back to work has been less terrible than I had expected it to be.

Enough words typed from my fingers, pictures!

Hey about that stuff

So about that room and baby, eh?  Well, the room is done and the baby is scheduled to be delivered via C-section one week from now which means this is my last ever weekend not being a parent.  Ho-lee crap.

For some reason I don't have any good pictures of the finished nursery on my phone so here is one of the closet organizer I put in a few weekends ago.  The snaziness is immense.

In other news directly related to the name of this blog, I've been slowly trying to count some gosh darn calories as well as getting back into biking.  I've been doing some rides around the general area of my home as well as going to the riverwalk to enjoy biking paths filled with inconsiderate people who walk in the middle of the damn path.  LEFT YOU SONS-A-BITCHES, ON YOUR LEFT!

On my most recent ride the trusty bike whose cost was 3 dollars USD has developed an ominous creaking noise, no doubt from the millions of pounds of pressure my thunderous leg muscles have been applying on the pedals.  That, or it just needs greased up or something.  For the time being I may be back on the trusty Trek mountain bike that makes up in gearing what it lacks in efficient means of going down the road.  

More likely I'll just stop riding because I'm going to be busy with a baby and stuff.  So yea.

The room, ya'll

The past month or so I've been absent from the website, but calm down, I've had good reason.  Last month I was on a lovely vacation lounging with the Dreese SASO squad and upon returning I've jumped right back into super productivity mode working on the baby's room.  In the past few weeks we've gone from the final stages of drywall finishing, to priming, to painting, to flooring.  Behold, by the power of the internet and digital photographs you can take the journey with me.  Come on, friend!

So far all we have left is the trim-work, adding doors to the closet and swapping out the bedroom door for one of the six-paneled variety (along with painting all said trim and door items).  Once that's taken care of I'll get to have a lot of fun assembling furniture type items and getting everything set up.  As long as it's taken I'm surprised it's turning out as well as it is, even though the bulk of the thanks can go to my drywall finishing teacher.  As a first timer I'm unbelievably happy with the results so far, unfortunately it's not reminded me that all the remaining rooms in our house are even uglier than before, if that was somehow possible.

Lastly, Amber reminded me yesterday that we only really have about 10 weeks left of baby-free living, which is fairly terrifying.  So yea, holy crap.

Forbidden love: Logitech Harmony 700

This remote right here is the best and super-awesomest invention known to my living room.  While I could stop there, and I probably should (seriously, just stop reading now), let me count the ways that it is the best ever.

1. You can finally put away all those different remotes and just use this one.  The end.

Before if I wanted to watch TV I would need at least two remotes, the receiver remote  and the satellite remote (that also turns on the tv).  If the input on the TV had been on anything but the TV input I would need a third remote.  Likewise, if I was firing up the xbox to watch some netflix or some downloaded TV shows, again I would need three remotes.  

Not so anymore, compadre (which is spanish for "herder of remotes").  You setup the remote by telling it what devices you have, what components do what, and what inputs your components should be on.  Bam, instant awesome.  There are many different models in the Logitech Harmony line, I chose this one because it was just $60 refurbished and it did everything I wanted.

The only small issues I've had so far are there was some initial panic when it didn't work with the satellite receiver (I needed to change the receiver to IR mode, not UHF mode), and when switching from a full powered off system and doing an activity that changes the TV input, you usually have to do the activity twice as the TV is slow to start up and it can't receive the change input commands.  There may or may not be a way to change this, but honestly it's not a big deal since I know it's going to happen.

Even Amber knew how to fix the problem, though so I can say the remote is very intuitive.  I honestly kick myself for not buying one earlier.