Gettin' The Junk Out

I believe the phrase is "one man's meat is another man's poison"--what's good for you may not be such hot stuff for me.

I've found myself thinking about this as my wife and I empty our house. We're getting ready for a major remodeling project and using it as an opportunity to purge our lives of a lot of stuff.

Some of it is just plain trash. But most of it falls in that in-between place: we don't want or need it anymore, but maybe someone else can use it.

We're not the garage-sale type. We've already hauled loads to the e-waste place, the toxic-waste place, and the Goodwill place. But much remains, mostly furniture that's too worn or too out-of-style to make the cut in the "new" house we're building.

We've been wrestling with this. The last thing we want to do is send any more trash to the dump than we must (and trust me, we're pretty low-impact: our average weekly trash output is less than one kitchen-sized bag). Yet we have a few items that are just too big or too funky to donate.

Most notable is the big-ass entertainment center. Oak. 5 feet wide by 6 feet high. A relic of an era where a TV set would fit inside the entertainment center. And way too big to fit in our car (not that it would matter, anyway--I couldn't find anyplace that would accept it as a donation). I wasn't really up for dealing with the whole Craigslist thing (lots of swapped messages, waiting around for someone who may or may not show, then may or may not want the thing, etc.)

We were almost resolved to the sad fact that we might have to smash it to pieces and send it off with the construction debris when I read about Freecycle. Simple, sort-of-hippie idea: keep stuff in use. Post stuff you want to unload (or stuff you want). Neighbor-to-neighbor.

Turns out we have an active Freecycle community in Alameda. So I posted a brief description of the entertainment center, and by the next morning, three people expressed interest.

It's not gone yet, but I'm feeling good things for the old entertainment center. I think it's going to live on, stay out of the dump, and be of use to somebody else. Way cool.