Thursday Thrift: craigslisting

Hi there!  This Thursday Thrift I'll share my first foray into buying something on craigslist.  So.  We bought our house in 1995.  It came with a refrigerator that I estimate is from the early 1970s.  Surely it was inefficient; it ran seemingly all the time.  Lately, it started making these moans and groans...I laughed out loud when I first heard it bc it sounded so tired!  As well it should be.  Say it's from 1975; that's 33 years ago!  We figured that its moans and groans would soon turn into a death rattle and we ought to look for another fridge. 

Longtime readers may recall that I have, in fact, an incredibly ugly kitchen.  From what the neighbors tell me, I've deduced that the kitchen was remodeled in the early 1970s due to a fire in that part of the house.  Naturally, it was remodeled in the style and colors of the time:  dark brown, tan, a semi-island.  We will remodel the kitchen.  Someday.  So I figured, we just need yer basic fridge to get us through until we remodel the kitchen, which I hope will be earlier than 'someday'.  Well, why not get a used fridge?  Not too old, not too expensive, not too far away...get a decent fridge, save money and yes, perhaps use a little gas and muscle to pick it up, move it in, move the old one out and get the old one to the dump recycling center (some in town are very sensitive to the fact that our municipal waste facilities be not called a 'dump', but rather a 'recycling center'; whatevs).

So where to get this used fridge?  They do auction/sell them on ebay.  I have used ebay to buy and sell things, although I'm not a frequent user.  I felt a little odd buying a used fridge on ebay even though some sellers said purchases were contingent on the seller demo-ing the fridge to the buyer's satisfaction.  Plus, some of the ebay fridges were kind of expensive.  This one has a Buy It Now price of $506.  It's very similar to the 1 yo fridge we eventually bought, which cost us $225.

I could possibly buy one advertised in the newspaper, but the ads don't have much info nor do they have pictures.  Plus they don't come up that often in the newspapers.  Plus plus you have to drive to see it and you might know from a picture that you don't like it.

How about craigslist?  I saw a few potential fridges and emailed back and forth with a few sellers about age, height, etc.  We eventually settled on a 1 yo Frigidaire in Rockaway, about 20 minutes away.  I knew that it might end up being a little tall to fit under the above-the-fridge-cabinets already in place in the kitchen, but getting rid of those is no big loss (although Kevin will tell you that it's turned out to be more complicated than just removing them).  What was up there, anyway?  Some fancy shmancy servingware that we only use a couple of times a year.  And a herd of water bottles we collected over the years from when we were more active and actually needed hydration during our leisure activities. 

We went there a few days ago, checked it out, bought it from the nice lady, loaded it onto Kevin's truck (he doesn't get to use his truck nearly enough for truck-like things), brought it home annnnnnd tried to figure out how to get it inside.  We knew it would get through the front door bc that's a wide door.  But who knew that it wouldn't get into the back door that leads directly into the kitchen?  Okay, no biggie, in a way it was probably easier to get it in the house through the front door bc there's only one step in the front of the house; the property slopes so there are about 5 steps onto the back porch.

So it's in the house.  We move the old fridge out the back door onto the back porch.  Through which of the two kitchen doors should we bring it into the ktichen?  Turns out neither becaaaauuuuusssse you guessed it, it was too wide to fit.  So the fridge is now in the dining room (next to the kitchen).  Kevin's working on fixing the space where the fridge will go bc a) the cabinet removal got ugly and b) the wall behind the fridge exhibited some cheesiness in that it wasn't all sheetrock.  He's also currently developing a cunning plan which cannot fail to get the fridge into the kitchen.

At one time in its dark past, our house had been an apartment house.  Let's back up a bit.  The way I understand it, the house started life as a single family home in the 1920s.  During/after WWII it became an apartment house due to a housing shortage.  Walls, doors and a set of back stairs/porches were added to divide the house into apartments.  E.g., the 2nd floor had a couple of doorways on the landing; one led to the front apartment and one to the back apartment on that floor.  The doors were removed once the house reverted to single-family usage, but the doorframes remained.  It was probably easier to not remove the framing.  Those particular doorframes went the way of the dodo when we remodeled that part of the house. 

We think the first floor bathroom and the dining room were sectioned off as an apartment.  There's a Bermuda triangle of doorframes in one very small area by where the bathroom, one kitchen door and dining room meet.  The Plan is that we may be able to get the fridge into the kitchen by removing a doorframe there.  The Other Plan is to do something similar to where the other kitchen door and the foyer meet.

I figured that something would likely go awry on my first craigslistering.  I knew the measurements of the fridge we were buying and it was only slightly bigger in width and depth than our old one.  The height was the main concern.  What went awry was my planning in that, obvs, I didn't measure all the doorways through which we might have to move the thing.  In a way, that's not such a big deal bc: a) we got a good deal on a good fridge; b) it's just the kind of fridge to get us through to whenever we remodel; and, most importantly, c) it was a good transaction, i.e., the seller was straight up about why she was selling it, easy to work with, reasonable, etc.  Internet communication is always chancy bc you don't have the benefit of seeing peoples' expressions, movements, gestures, etc.  Still, there were some postings and sellers I did not pursue bc I didn't care for the vibe of the posting and/or the emails.  Admittedly, they may have been fine, upstanding purveyors of used major appliances, but I figured that there are so many for sale that I'd rather wait for a situation with which I felt comfortable.

The old fridge is on the back porch until it retires to the recycling center this weekend:

 

The new-to-us fridge, external view:

 

Internal view: