Shedding deadweight

Over the past year, Brian has been slowly collecting shipping pallets and odd bits of lumber from various spots around town. He didn't have any particular use in mind for them, but he knew they could come in handy for projects like our DIY compost bin, so whenever he happened to spot a piece in good condition, he'd just grab it and stow it away in our shed. All these new acquisitions sat snuggled up against the top from our old patio table, which Brian had also squirreled away "just in case" after we replaced the patio set last summer. Since the shed isn't very big and already contained quite a lot of stuff, useful and otherwise, it gradually became harder and harder to get around in there.

So, Saturday morning, he decided it was time to haul out all that wood and "do something" with it. He hadn't actually figured out what he wanted to do with it, but he thought he'd retrieve it first and take it from there. But in order to haul out the wood, he had to first haul out all the other stuff in the shed that was blocking his path to it. And once he'd started doing that, he realized that some of the stuff in question was in pretty bad condition and really should be disposed of. So when I came down to join him, about 20 minutes after he'd gone out (saying vaguely that he'd "be outside"), I found the yard looking more or less like this and Brian in the process of breaking apart an old plastic trash barrel—which we'd somehow managed to get stuck inside another trash barrel—with his bare hands.  

Well, once I saw this project in progress, naturally I had to jump in. What started out as just a general notion of dealing with the wood pile turned into a full-scale clear-out and reorganization of the shed contents. Over the next few hours, we dragged out pretty much everything that was sitting on every horizontal surface in that shed—floor, table, shelves—and decided what was worth putting back and where it should go. (Since I'd come late to the party, I didn't manage to get a "before" picture of the shed in its cluttered state, but I took several of the "during" and "after.")

We kept the big pile of old birdseed bags that we use to haul bulk compost and mulch home from the Co-Op, but we discarded most of the smaller cat-food bags that were too small for this purpose. (We brought a few indoors to use as trash bags, and we kept a couple as material for tree bands to foil pests like squirrels and lanternflies.) We sorted out our tangled piles of rope and deer netting, removed the damaged ones, bundled the rest up neatly, and tucked them into one large bin together. We went through our huge collection of plant pots, removing any that were damaged and culling some of the ones in less useful sizes. (The remaining collection is still huge, but at least it's now been neatly sorted into stacks that won't fall over.) We tossed several items that had clearly ceased to be useful, such as torn gardening gloves and the aforementioned big trash barrel, which Brian divided into two large pieces so it could fit inside our even larger trash bin. And we swept off all the exposed surfaces, clearing away years' worth of accumulated dust, straw, and desiccated rat droppings (though, fortunately, no fresh ones).

Among the trash, we also found several items that were possibly useful to someone, just not to us. These included:

• A set of very nice garden tools (a fork and two trowels) that were still sitting unused in their original box. We'd received them as a gift and never used them because we were so used to our old ones. Fortunately, these quickly found a new home on Freecycle. 
• A grill basket too large to fit on our grill and a couple of other grilling tools (a long spatula and fork) that we'd picked up somewhere and never used. These will go on Freecycle as soon as we've cleaned some of the rust off them.
• The pan and funnel we used for changing the oil in our old Honda, which we haven't used in over 14 years. (The oil pan on our "new" car, bought in 2011, proved much harder to access, and we decided it wasn't worth the hassle.) These will also go on Freecycle.
• An old trowel that's not as nice as our three other trowels. This went out by the curb with our discarded plant pots, where it was quickly snapped up.
• An  unidentified electrical device that plugs into a car charger. Brian thought it was meant for defrosting a cold engine block, but when I searched "engine block heater" online I couldn't find anything that looks like it, and I hesitate to list it on Freecycle if I can't even put a name to it.
• An old rolling cart that had been sitting in the corner of the shed ever since we bought the place. When we dragged it out, we discovered that it was apparently meant to hold electrical appliances, because it had a crude power strip built into one side: a couple of small outlets connected to an ancient electrical cord with no grounding plug. That feature probably isn't useful anymore, but the cart itself could be, so we set it out on the curb as well. If that doesn't work, we'll try Freecycle.

Once all the junk was gone and the surfaces were clear, we could find better spots for the things we wanted to keep. Our Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluders, two useful but unwieldy chicken-wire constructions, found a new home on a high shelf with a couple of tarps and a spare garden hose. The PVC pipes we use to make cages for our honeyberry bushes got tucked away on a lower shelf behind some smaller pots and tools. A couple of tools that had previously sat on the floor got hung up on the wall, now that we had access to the wall to hang them.

The reorganized shed is much cleaner and airier than the cluttered space we started out with. We didn't actually get rid of that much stuff, but it all fits in much better, giving us much better access to the things we use regularly. And there's enough room left over to put away the charcoal grill and the patio chairs once winter comes.

Ironically, one thing that ended up going back into the shed was that big stack of pallets. We spent so long on the cleanup that, in the end, Brian didn't have the time or the energy to break them down. But at least they're out of the way now, tucked into the corner where that rolling cart used to be, so they're no longer impeding our movement.

Taming the hell strip

Ever since we bought this house, Brian and I have been trying to reduce the amount of grass on the property—particularly in the little boxed-in front yard. We added the three plum trees, each with its own little island of mulch. We created a bed of day lilies along the cinder block wall. We made several attempts to get a ground cover established in the other portions of the yard, with varying degrees of success. And last month, Brian announced that he'd like to remove the grass from an area I'd never really thought about before: the narrow slice of turf between the sidewalk and street, which is apparently even more of a nuisance to keep mowed than the rest of the yard.

He wasn't quite sure what he wanted on this little sliver of land, aside from "not grass," so I offered to do a little research. I learned, first of all, that this narrow plot is commonly known as the "hell strip," and second, that it's a tricky area to landscape. Plants need to be narrow enough that they won't impinge on the sidewalk and tough enough to survive with very little soil underfoot. And in our yard, they face the additional challenges of heavy clay soil, full afternoon sun, and hungry deer and groundhogs. After consulting several sources online to see what could stand up to this environment, I proposed a mixture of salvia and rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susans), with maybe a few little thyme plants to fill in the gaps. We already had salvia seeds from our planter project, so we bought a packet of rudbeckia seeds (as well as one of English lavender, which happened to catch Brian's eye), and I figured we'd plant them in the spring.

But this weekend, Brian decided he didn't want to wait that long. With an extra free day from the holiday weekend, he wanted to tackle a project he could see through from start to finish. He started sketching out some plans on Friday, and on Saturday morning he was out there turfing out the sod from the hell strip. He didn't do the whole thing, just a 12-foot section starting at the edge of the driveway. Then he disappeared into the shop and emerged with a small, odd-shaped bracket he'd built out of some pressure-treated 2-by-4 lumber he had leftover from the planter project. This little lopsided trapezoid was just the right size to fill in the angle formed by the driveway apron, turning the rest of the hellstrip into an even rectangle.

Next to that, he began laying out a small paved area that would serve as a landing pad for our trash and recycling bins. We didn't have any groundcloth to keep weeds out, but we had some heavy paper leaf bags that had proved equally effective at weed suppression in our garden paths. Laid flat, the bag was exactly wide enough to fill in the strip. Brian then began covering it with the last of the pavers leftover from our patio project, which had spent the last several years stashed in the shed. After filling in the cracks with fine sand (from a bag we acquired so long ago we've forgotten what it was originally for, he boxed in the remainder of the strip with more lengths of 2-by-4 and filled it up with topsoil. (He didn't nail these pieces together, so whenever he wants to expand the hellstrip planting, he can simply remove the end piece and add more boards to extend the frame.)

By the end of Saturday, he had the entire strip neatly laid out and already looking much better than it had before. However, we knew that if we simply left it like this, it wouldn't stay nice-looking for long. The "grass" (which in our yard really means a mixture of crabgrass and other lawn weeds) would re-colonize the nicely-laid-out bed in short order if we didn't get something else in there. We didn't have time to start a bunch of salvia, lavender, and Black-Eyed Susans indoors, and if we sowed the seeds directly in the midsummer heat, they might not survive. So we decided to stop by the same nursery where we'd bought the plants for our large planters last spring and grab a few deer-tolerant plants to serve as place holders for the rest of the season.

Unfortunately, the nursery was closed, presumably on account of the holiday weekend. We tried the nearby Home Depot, but the only suitable plants we found there were a few salvias, which we already had at home. So we switched to Plan B: digging up and transplanting some of the salvia from our planters, along with any other plants we could scavenge from our flowerbeds. We found one large echinacea that had somehow seeded itself in our herb bed, as well as several smaller ones scattered closer to their parent plants. We also divided off several sections from our largest yarrow plant, since multiple sources had recommended yarrow as a suitable plant for hellstrips. However, the plant was so huge and floppy that we quickly realized the pieces extracted from it would never manage to stand upright on their own. Brian planted a couple of them next to the street sign at one end of the strip with a wire cage around them for support, hoping that once they're in full sun they'll eventually take on a more upright posture. The rest of the bed got filled in with a mixture of salvia and echnicacea and covered with a layer of wood-chip mulch. (We got this free from a neighbor of ours who got a large delivery of wood chips from a tree service and generously offered up the leftovers on Freecycle.)

This newly planted area doesn't exactly look polished, but between the paved area and the layer of mulch, it's fairly neat. Come next spring, we'll start a bunch of echnicea, salvia, and maybe lavender and plant the area more fully. But for now, it's a decided improvement on the "grass" we had there before.

A completed birthday project (and one to come)

Last January, I asked Brian for my most ambitious DIY birthday gift ever: cleaning up our unfinished workshop/laundry room/storage room. I wanted to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, neatly organize the stuff that remained, and most importantly, cover up the bare insulation that currently served as the wall surface. I knew at the time I asked that this was a big project that might take up to half a year to finish. But as it turns out, that was a serious underestimate. 

It took us a couple of months just to get around to the first stage of the project. In March, we went through all the stuff in the room and identified several things we didn't need: a junker bike we'd picked up off the curb, loads of other bike parts, my unused guitar case, a hanging-file box, a big box full of brown glass bottles that we'd picked up for free at a yard sale and used only a few of, a box of wooden blocks, and a packing tape dispenser. We donated all the bike stuff to the New Brunswick Bike Exchange and disposed of the rest without difficulty on Freecycle. 

After that, we couldn't get started on covering the walls until we'd bought the necessary lumber. But since it came in large sheets and our little Honda couldn't possibly hold more than one, this step required renting a truck. We finally got around to doing that in June, when we were able to use the same truck to pick up a new patio set from Craigslist (along with the lumber for Brian's planter project). The year was more than half over before we actually got the boards cut to size and up onto the walls (first flipping around the batts of insulation so that the moisture barrier was properly positioned on the outside, facing toward the heated space). And it took us all the way until my next birthday—and just a little bit longer—to complete the job of tidying and reorganizing the stuff that remained.

But tidy it we did, and I'm ready at last to unveil the final result. First, as a reminder of what we were up against, here's the "before" picture of the room as it looked when I asked for this present a year ago. 

And here's the "after," as seen from roughly the same angle.

The lighting is still terrible for photography, but everything else is so much better. The two remaining bikes are both neatly hung from the ceiling, the boxes are all neatly stowed on the shelves, the work table has been cleared off, and all the tools have been arranged so that they're visible and easy to access.

Here it is from another angle: the before...

...and the after. In this shot, you can see the neat reorganization of the shelves, the workbench (which has a usable surface for the first time in years) and, most of all, the scrap wood pile. It's now all neatly tucked into the back corner, arranged by size, rather than spilling out onto the floor.

 

Let's come in for a couple of close-ups. Here's one of the wall nearest the door, with its nice new wood covering. In addition to hiding away the insulation, the OSB wood panels make a suitable spot for hanging things. We put up a little hook to hold our clothespin bag (my old purse) and hung up the extra sections of our shoe rack to provide convenient, accessible storage for safety gear and extension cords. This also had the advantage of getting them out of their storage box so we could throw it away, freeing up more shelf space.

And here's a look at our reorganized tool storage. We already had that pegboard and most of the hooks; it was just a matter of arranging them optimally to display most of our tools. The few that don't fit are either tucked in a toolbox or neatly laid out on the cabinet below. (We did buy a few extra tool hooks, but they cost less than $15 total.)

The one problem with this new layout is that I can't quite reach the top row of tools on the board. But Brian addressed that with one more DIY piece, completed just today: a little step stool made out of scrap lumber. (He realized after completing it that the supports were placed too far in, so he added markings to indicate where I could step on it without tipping it over. But he'll probably take it apart and reassemble it at some point.)

Here's one last area that I didn't manage to get a good "before" picture of: the floating shelf over the utility sink. Previously, this shelf was a piece of MDF that was seriously bowed under the weight of all the various detergents and cleaning tools piled on it. Now it's a smaller piece of leftover plywood that neatly holds a pared-down assortment of cleaning supplies we'll actually use.

So how much did the project cost in total? Well, it depends on how you count. We spent $244.56 on lumber at Home Depot, but about half of that was for the planter project, so that's only about $125 for the walls. Add the $15 or so we spent on tool-hanging hardware, and that's around $140 worth of supplies. But if you include the $102 we spent on the U-Haul to get all that lumber home, that brings the total cost to around $242—still less than the cost of the closet doors that were my 2016 birthday present, but not by much. And in terms of time and elbow grease, this project was probably at least as demanding.

After this complicated project, I'm hoping my birthday request for this year will be a lot easier to fulfill. Over the years, the grout in our shower has become increasingly stained, despite my best efforts to keep it clean. Also, bits of it have fallen out, leaving deeper gaps between the tiles, which makes the stains even harder to remove. So, for this year, I've asked to redo all the grout, then seal it so that it will stay put and stay clean. We've done this job once before, so we know we can handle it, but last time we neglected the sealing step. I'm hoping that with a good sealant, we can keep the grout clean and intact for at least a few years, and when it starts to wear off, we can just reapply the sealant instead of having to replace all the grout. I've already invested in a bottle of Aqua-X Grout Sealer, which got good reviews from several professional review sites (including this professional tiler). Now all we need is a tub of grout and—always the tricky part—a free weekend to apply it.

A farewell to CFLs

This week, Brian and I received a free "Quick Home Energy Check-up" from our utility. Basically, they sent a guy out to our house who looked at our heating system, insulation, appliances, and so on, and made recommendations about ways to save energy. Most of what we learned from this was not news to us. Overall, our home is pretty efficient: our attic is well insulated, our faucets low-flow, our appliances mostly up-to-date. The contractor pointed out a couple of changes worth making (sealing the attic hatch and repairing a compromised double-glazed window) and one that we don't consider worth making (replacing our water heater solely on the grounds that it's over 10 years old, which I already knew was rubbish. We do eventually want to replace it with an electric one, ideally an efficient heat pump model, in order to get our whole house off of fossil fuels, but I see no reason to rush the process.)

The best part, though, was that we got a bunch of free stuff. As part of the checkup process, the checker-up made a whole series of minor efficiency upgrades on the spot. He insulated the one bit of our water heater's pipe that wasn't wrapped already and replaced both our 2.5-gpm shower heads with shiny new 1.5-gpm models that have proved just as effective and satisfying to use. And he replaced all our old compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) with new LED bulbs. Or at least, almost all.

We'd already installed LEDs in the fixtures where we thought they'd make most difference in terms of lifespan, looks, or performance. But other fixtures still contained CFLs, since we already had a bunch of them and figured we might as well use them up before replacing them. So this helpful fellow went through and upgraded the bulbs in our living room table lamps, our guest room lamp, and all the fixtures downstairs—all, that is, except the overhead fixture nearest the stairs. On that one, he spent several minutes turning the "nipple" that held the cover in place, and it just would not come off. It turned freely, but it refused to part ways with the bolt it was attached to. It was a baffling problem, one he'd never encountered before in 15 years on the job, and eventually he had to leave those last two lonely CFLs in place.

After he left, though, Brian messed around with the light for a bit and eventually managed to get the cover off. (He just grabbed the nut with his locking pliers and kept turning the entire bolt assembly until it unscrewed at the other end.) And once he had the light reassembled, he was able to replace those last two CFLs with two extra LEDs that had been removed from the fixture in our downstairs bathroom. (They didn't quite match, so the contractor had replaced them with a matched set of nicer-looking LED globes.) And with that, our interior lighting was finally 100 percent LED-based. 

This left us with a new problem: what to do with all our old CFLs. We had a pretty big collection of them, some left over from previous bulk purchases and some that we'd removed from the fixtures we'd already upgraded to LEDs, and there was no real chance we'd ever use them again. Normally, when we have stuff we no longer need, I try to Freecycle it, but I had a hard time believing anyone would want these old CFLs now that LEDs are so cheap and readily available. (You can buy them at Home Depot for as little as $1.75 apiece now, which is less than we paid for most of our CFLs.) And, as Brian pointed out, even if someone took them just because they were free, they wouldn't be taking the place of less efficient incandescent bulbs; as of this year, those are no longer on the market. All they'd be doing is delaying the transition to the still more efficient, longer-lasting, less-hazardous LEDs. So in the end, we bundled up the lot and hauled them all to the nearest Home Depot for recycling. 

We also brought with us two other CFLs that the contractor hadn't replaced: the two in the exterior light by our kitchen door. We figured if we going to Home Depot anyway, we might as well look for LED replacements for these bulbs as well. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to us to measure the fixtures first, so the pair of EcoSmart bulbs we picked up for $15 turned out to be too wide to fit—and we'd already disposed of the old CFLs. Fortunately, we had another exterior fixture by the patio door, so we just installed the new LED floodlight bulbs in that one. Then we transferred the two ancient incandescent floodlight bulbs from that fixture, which had been there since we bought the house and possibly for several years before that, to the side door.

So now, ironically, the only fixture at our house that doesn't have LEDs is still using old, ridiculously inefficient incandescents. But since that light doesn't get used very often, it's not that big a deal. We can pick up some new LED bulbs for it (that actually fit) the next time we're at a home store, and dispose of the old bulbs with our regular household trash. And at that point, we'll finally move all our home's lighting into the twenty-first century.

Doing the same for our heating and plumbing, now, that will be a much bigger job. But at least we've made a start.

Money Crashers: 20 Bartering & Swapping Websites — Best Places to Trade Stuff Online

My latest piece for Money Crashers is about bartering and swapping websites. I'm personally a heavy user of Freecycle, which is technically not a swapping site but a sharing one; you can give stuff and receive stuff, but there's no this-for-that exchange. Bartering is a little tougher to pull off, because you have to have something another person wants and also want what that person has. But the Internet makes it easier by gathering together a big group of people all interested in swapping the same kind of thing, such as books or clothes, to improve your chances of finding a match.

This article is a roundup of 20 sites to help you do this. There are sites to exchange all kinds of things, from clothes to music to vacation housing. Some can only arrange direct one-for-one swaps; some can do three-way swaps, where you give A to someone who gives B to someone else who gives you C; and some use a points-based system, where you give an item to earn points you can cash in for someone else's item (so it's really more like an alternative form of money than like barter). There are even a few sharing sites like Freecycle thrown into the mix.

20 Bartering & Swapping Websites — Best Places to Trade Stuff Online

Freecycle track record

My plans to celebrate the Jewish new year by getting rid of a bunch of stuff on Freecycle have not been altogether successful. Of the six items I posted — a working cordless phone, bottles of potassium and magnesium supplements, two partly-used containers of skin-care products, and a set of cheap cloth face masks from Target that didn't fit either me or Brian properly — only one (the magnesium supplements) was actually taken. The phone and the skin-care products all got "Hey, I'm interested" messages, but when I replied to the senders attempting to arrange an actual pickup, they all ghosted me. (Note to any Freecycle members reading this post: Please don't do that.)

The good news is, I was able to find good homes for three of the other items through other means. After taking another look at the masks, I concluded that it would only take a few stitches and some knots in the ear loops to adjust them to a size that I could use. So I did that with both masks, and I now have two more close-fitting masks to add to my rotation. And I was able to dispose of two other items by dropping them off yesterday on my parents' table at their local town-wide yard sale, where they were offering up a bunch of free items that they had purged from their storage room in the wake of last month's flood. We left all our unclaimed stuff on this table, and before we'd even finished locking up our car, a woman had pulled up, snagged the two skin-care products, and departed again. (Sadly, the cordless phone and the potassium supplements had not found takers by the end of the day, but we did score a few good finds for ourselves at the sales — two shirts for me, a working set of headphones for Brian, a book for one of our nephews, a piece of scrap wood, a quartz crystal that's useless but decorative, and a little tool for rounding off the corners of pages — all for less than $10. So I'd call that a win-win.)

Anyway, today I was entering the results of these efforts on my Freecycle log, which I started keeping back in 2014 to keep track of items I'd posted on Freecycle and which ones had been taken. And it occurred to me that this document provided an interesting record of our successes and failures with Freecycle over the past six-plus years. I won't reproduce the entire list, but here's a summary of the most pertinent facts:

Since December 2014, we have offered 126 items up on Freecycle. Of those items, we successfully gave away 89 through the site, a success rate of about 70%. Most of these items were requested by only one or two people, but a few scored multiple requests. The most in-demand items were:

• A couple of Pyrex bowls (acquired as part of a set when we only needed the largest one), with seven requests
• A specialty cake pan for baking a cake in the shape of a train (scavenged from a freebie pile on a whim, and discarded after we learned my youngest nephew was no longer all that into trains), with six requests
  
• An antique pharmacy lamp that had belonged to Brian's grandfather, also with six requests
• We got four requests each for an IKEA table lamp, an indoor TV antenna, a set of cabinet organizer shelves, and my dad's old computer. Interestingly, my mom's computer, listed at the same time, got only two requests.

That leaves 37 items we could not find new homes for on Freecycle. We managed to give away 17 of these through other venues, mainly the Freecycle table at the Morristown Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, where the Troubadour concerts are held. This table, which sat outside the upstairs bathrooms, functioned as a miniature free store where people could drop off or pick up pretty much any small item, from books to coffee mugs. (Unfortunately, the table vanished in 2017, so I had to find new ways to dispose of things, including the local thrift shop and the Vietnam Veterans.)

Three of the remaining 20 items never found a taker and were eventually recycled. Our old printer and my mom's old scanner went to electronics recycling shed run by our local Department of Public Works, and a pair of CFL bulbs that didn't fit any of our lamps went into the recycling bin at Home Depot. So even if these items couldn't be reused, at least they didn't end up as toxic waste in a landfill.

There were two posts that we eventually retracted. One, as I mentioned above, was the pair of cloth masks that I ended up altering to fit me. The other was a square food container that we hadn't really been using, but once it became apparent no one else was interested in it, we decided to hold on to it rather than throw it away. It actually did prove useful for a while as a way to transport blocks of tofu purchased sans packaging at the Whole Earth Center, eliminating the need for disposable plastic bags. However, we haven't been able to get to the Whole Earth Center much lately, and on the few occasions when we've been there, the bulk tofu didn't appear to be available anymore. So this item may end up being relisted at some point.

The only items that never found homes were:

• Four teddy bears in like-new condition, including one quite nice one that still had its tags on. They're still sitting on our windowsill, since it seemed too cruel to just consign them to the trash.
• One unused oil filter for our old car, which we eventually had to throw away.
• One reusable plastic drinking cup with a lid and built-in straw, which is still taking up space in our cupboard.
• A pair of earrings made from some semiprecious stone I couldn't identify, which are still taking up space — but not too much — in my jewelry box. (The matching necklace was taken.)
• Our old cordless phone, which has so far been listed not only on Freecycle but also on our local Buy Nothing Group and in the "finds" section on our local Nextdoor group, all to no avail. (Maybe nobody around here uses landline phones anymore?) I guess we may end up taking this one to the recycling shed as well — a pity, since it still works, but the only reasonable alternative if no one wants it.
  
• A partly-used box of Tagamet (an anti-acid medication) and the partly-used bottle of potassium supplements I listed recently. I guess we can always dispose of these at our town's next medication takeback day, since it's not recommended to flush them down the toilet.

So, assuming my math is correct, our various efforts have successfully kept 116 items out of the landfill. Better still, 106 of those items went to people who (presumably) could use them, saving them money and saving the energy and natural resources that would have gone into making new items they would otherwise have purchased.

In short, Freecycle is a good, but not perfect way to dispose of unwanted items — particularly lamps, electronics, and kitchen gadgets (at least in our area). But some items — such as stuffed animals and over-the-counter drugs (at least in our area) — will never be all that welcome, and it's best to have alternative routes for getting rid of them. (Anyone know a good place to give away teddy bears?)

Starting the year off light

Tomorrow night is the start of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish year. Most years, I mark this occasion by going to services with my parents at their synagogue (either with both of them in the evening, or with just Mom in the daytime). But this year, the synagogue remains officially closed; the only in-person event will be an outdoor barbecue, and the service itself will be entirely virtual for the second year in a row. I can't log into that virtual service from home since I'm not officially a member, and we agreed that it would be a bit silly for me to go to my parents' house just so we could watch it together on the computer. So I need to find some other way to commemorate the occasion.

Now, one ritual associated with Rosh Hashanah is Tashlich, or "casting off." You go to a nearby body of water, ideally a flowing river or stream, and throw bread crumbs into it to symbolize casting off your sins. (Actually, it's apparently more popular these days to throw leaves or pebbles, since bread crumbs aren't good for the wildlife.) If that word "sins" has too much baggage for your taste, you can think of it instead as ridding yourself of anything unwanted or harmful in your life: bad habits, unwelcome thoughts, anything that's weighing you down and keeping you from living the kind of life you aspire to.

I tried taking part in this ritual last year, going down to the park and attempting to toss crumbs off the dock into the Raritan River, but the area was crammed with members of a local synagogue who'd come for the same reason. So this year, I'm taking a different approach: I'm going to rid myself of excess baggage by Freecycling it.

I'd already made a start last week by listing our old cordless phone, which we replaced earlier this year because it had become unreliable after we switched back to Verizon. (Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it simply didn't ring when a call came in.) Only one person replied to that post, saying only "I'm interested," but apparently they weren't interested enough to respond when I suggested they fix up a time for pickup. (Why do people do that?) I followed up by listing it on my local Buy Nothing Group, which I've recently joined via Facebook, but so far no takers there either.

But I refused to let this setback daunt me. Today I went through the drawer in our bathroom that serves as an overflow medicine chest and purged two bottles of skincare products and three bottles of mineral supplements that hadn't worked for me. Within minutes of listing them, I already had inquiries about three of these items, and one of them is already gone. That's a promising start.

While I'm at it, I'm doing my best to clear a backlog of other stuff, too. Catching up on long-overdue cleaning tasks, like washing all the glasses on my stemware rack (and the rack itself). Getting up-to-date with all my various medical checkups. And most importantly, finally getting around to donating the remainder of the stimulus money we received during the pandemic. Since we didn't need this money ourselves, we've been trying to donate it in ways that support the community, such as funding a local summer outdoor movie series and helping to Kickstart the coolest bookmobile ever. So today, I sent a message to inquire about donating the $1500 or so we have left to a fund for local businesses. (I'd tried inquiring about this before, but got no response, so this time I decided to try filling out the online form as if I were a business seeking funds and explaining that my "proposed project" is to support other businesses.)

Between freeing myself of things I don't need and getting money to businesses that do need it, I'd say I'm getting the year off to a good start. I may not be exactly free of sin, but I think actively doing something good is probably more helpful than making a promise — which may not even last the whole year — to quit doing something bad.

Money Crashers: 3 new pieces, 2 updates

Several more of my articles have appeared on Money Crashers in the past few days — some new, some older articles that needed to be refreshed with up-to-date numbers. Some of these were meant to be published for Earth Day, but only one of them actually made it onto the site in time; however, they all appeared during Earth Week, at least, so that's sort of a win.

The new pieces are:

1. Latte Factor – Giving Up Lattes Won’t Make You Rich But Here’s What Will

In this piece, I quibble with financial guru David Bach's famous "latte factor" formula: the idea that you can become rich by just cutting out some small indulgence, such as a daily latte, and channeling that money into investments instead. The problem: the math doesn't add up. This piece show exactly why the latte factor doesn't work, and explains how to tackle the much harder jobs that actually will make a difference: minimizing your fixed expenses, maximizing your income, and choosing the right investments.

2. 14 Disposable Items You Can Ditch to Save $1.5K This Year – Alternatives

This is the piece that got published in time for Earth Day, though it had actually been in the works for months. It covers a lot of the same ground as last year's Thrift Week posts, showing how reusable alternatives to disposable stuff — water bottles, soda bottles, batteries, paper towels — can keep money in your pocket and help the planet at the same time.

3. What Is the Freecycle Network – Give & Get Free Stuff

An updated version of a piece done in 2012 by another writer, this one is also relevant to Earth Week because it deals with reuse. It sums up a lot of what I've said about Freecycle on this blog over the years in a single post: how it works, what it's good for, what kind of problems you can run into when Freecycling, and how proper Freecycle etiquette can make the process smoother for everyone.

The updated pieces are:

1. How to Save Money by Living Green – Saving Electricity, Gas & Trees

One of the first pieces I ever published on Money Crashers back in 2015, this article has been updated with new prices and other facts that reflect changes in technology and consumer behavior over the past five years, such as improvements to energy-efficient light bulbs, the continuing decline of paper newspapers.

2. How to Save Money With Your High-Speed Internet Service Provider

This 2018 piece is newer, but even two years have brought about significant changes in the spread of high-speed Internet and the prices people pay for it. And, with so many people moving more of our lives online in response to COVID, it's timely.

Freecycle etiquette

Early this month, Brian took advantage of the time off he had for the holiday weekend to do a little cleanup in the laundry room/workshop. Though you may not be able to tell it from the picture, he actually got rid of quite a lot of stuff, sending some to the trash and some upstairs for me to list on Freecycle.

So over the past few weeks, I've made several Freecycle posts and dealt with several different Freecyclers, and the experience has reminded me of something I've thought for a while: there really ought to be a code of etiquette for dealing with people on Freecycle. It might seem like the rules of polite behavior on Freecycle are pretty much the same as they are anywhere else and shouldn't need explaining—but apparently they do, since so many people violate them all the time.

Since it appears that Miss Manners has somehow managed to overlook this particular area, I guess it falls to me to fill in the gap. So here are my proposed Rules of Freecycle Etiquette.

Rule 1: Provide a clear description.
When you offer an item on Freecycle, describe it as clearly and specifically as possible. Include a picture for any item that people might choose based partly on looks, or any item that's hard to describe clearly in writing. Also, provide as much detail you can in the item description, such as dimensions, color, material, and brand and model number. Providing all this information up front saves people the trouble of e-mailing you to ask for details—and it helps you by eliminating the risk for you that someone will request an item, show up, decide they don't like the looks of it, and back out.

Rule 2: Respond to messages.
If someone contacts you about a Freecycle post—either to request an item you've posted, or to offer something you've requested—you have an obligation to respond. Even if the item they're requesting is no longer available, simple courtesy demands that you tell them so.

Yet apparently, most Freecyclers don't bother to extend this common courtesy to others. Many times I've asked for an item and simply been left waiting for an answer, and it's incredibly annoying. I have no way of knowing whether I should be trying to plan my schedule around picking up the item or not. Whenever someone contacts me to ask for an item that I've already promised to someone else, I always reply to tell them so, and they usually respond with something along the lines of, "OK, thank you for letting me know." This shows that (1) they appreciate getting a reply, and (2) they're surprised to get it, because most people don't bother.

Rule 3: Express your intentions.
When you first contact someone about a Freecycle post, your message should state specifically what you want from them. If your message simply says, "Hi, is the bureau still available?" the other person has to e-mail you back to ask, "Yes, do you want it?" and then wait for your reply before you can start the process of making arrangements for a pickup. If you had simply said, "I am interested in the bureau, if it is still available," you could have started making arrangements right away.

Now, you might argue that this isn't really necessary, because obviously, anyone asking about the bureau must be interested in it. So in theory, you could simply respond to "Hi, is the bureau still available?" with "Yes, when would you like to pick it up?" But unfortunately, experience has taught me that this isn't a reasonable assumption. Often, my reply of "Yes, do you want it?" meets with no response—which suggests the answer is "No, not really." If I had instead replied with, "Yes, when would you like to pick it up?" I would have been left waiting for a reply that would never come, and being forced in the meantime to turn down other people who are requesting the same thing because I've already promised it to someone else.

In fact, it's better still if you go one step further and state in that first message not just that you are interested in the item, but when you would be able to pick it up: "I am interested in the bureau, if it is still available. I could pick it up Monday evening, if that's convenient." Including this information in your first message saves another round of back-and-forth messages. I have taken to putting in my posts, "If you are interested, please state in your first message when you can pick it up," in the hopes that this will save time—yet even then, most people ignore the request.

Rule 4: Be specific as to place and time.
This is kind of an extension of rule 3: when you offer to pick up an item, be as specific as possible about when you will be there. If you say, "I will come by some time on Saturday," or worse yet, "some time next weekend," then I have no idea when to expect you. If the item is too big for porch pickup, I'll be effectively held captive in my house all weekend waiting for you with no idea when you'll show up. If I'm leaving it out for porch pickup, this is less of a big deal, but it's still a minor inconvenience not to know how long the item will be out there.

By the same token, if you're the person offering the item, provide clear information about where your house is and what they must do to retrieve the item. I give not only my address, but a description of the house and a couple of landmarks they can use to help them find it. I also tell them if I want them to ring the bell or if I will leave the item out for porch pickup, and if it's the latter, exactly where the item will be: "I'll put it in a bag labeled 'Freecycle' and tie it to the railings of the side stoop." This may seem like overkill, but even with these detailed directions, some people still have trouble finding an item I've left out for them, and they either ring the bell or e-mail me later to say they came by and couldn't find it. But I can at least minimize the problem by being as specific as possible.

4. Honor your obligations.
If you have promised an item to someone, make sure that item is in the stated place at the stated time. If you said you would leave it out for porch pickup, make sure it's out there by the time the person is supposed to arrive; if they're coming to the door, then make sure you're home at the time they said they'd be there. And, obviously, if you have promised something to one person, don't give it to someone else instead just because they could come pick it up earlier. If you're not willing to wait until Tuesday, then don't promise the item to someone who can't come until Tuesday.

Likewise, if you have promised to pick something up at a given time, be there at that time. Don't assume that, just because the item is free, it doesn't really matter if you keep your promise. Even though there's no money at stake, you are still creating inconvenience for the person who posted it and has been forced to stay home waiting for you, or else gone to the trouble of hauling the item out to the porch only to see it sit there unclaimed.

Of course, emergencies do happen that can prevent you from showing up as scheduled. Your car breaks down; you have to stay home with a sick child; you're forced to work late. If something like this happens and you can't be there when you promised you would, SAY SO. It only takes a minute to send an e-mail to say you can't make it and attempt to reschedule. That way, the person can at least leave the house instead of sitting there waiting and wondering if you're ever going to show up. And if you can't arrange another suitable time for the pickup, they at least have a chance to withdraw their offer and give the item to someone else, instead of being stuck in limbo with an item they can't get rid of and can't give to anyone else because it's already promised to you.

5. Post a "taken" message.
After your item has been picked up, remember to go back to Freecycle and post a new message to say the item is now taken. Otherwise, it will still appear as an available item, and people will waste their time and yours asking you about it.


If everyone could just follow these five simple rules when using Freecycle, I think it would be a much more pleasant experience for everyone—givers and receivers alike. If you think there are any other important rules of Freecycle etiquette that I've left out, let me know in the comments.

Freecycle find

I wasn't able to post last week, because we were away all weekend at a Morris dance event in Massachusetts. So to make up for it, I'm doing a quickie midweek post to share my latest frugal triumph: some organic baking supplies I scored yesterday on Freecycle.

When I checked my e-mail first thing on Monday morning, I found a "daily digest" e-mail from Freecycle containing this listing:

OFFER: Organic baking ingredients (Highland Park)

Organic coconut flour, coconut oil and almond flour. Coconut flour and
oil have been opened and used. Nothing wrong with either- just not our
preference. Almond flour still sealed!

Now, normally, I check with Brian before requesting any item on Freecycle, since I like to get his input on whether we're actually likely to use an item before bringing it into the house. But in this case, I felt so confident we could use these goodies that I just immediately sent a reply saying I could pick them up that afternoon. I wasn't too confident I'd get them, since I've jumped on Freecycle offers before only to find them already taken, but I figured I had nothing to lose by trying.

To my surprise, I got a message back within half an hour saying the baking ingredients were still available and offering to leave them out for porch pickup. So I popped over there during my afternoon walk and came home with this lovely assortment. As advertised, the coconut flour and coconut oil had both been sampled, but they were still mostly full, and the almond flour was untouched.

In case you don't quite comprehend what a deal this is, take a look at the retail prices of these items:

• Bob's Red Mill almond meal: $9.50 at Target
• Bob's Red Mill coconut flour: $4.20 at Target
• Organic coconut oil: I couldn't find a price for the 365 Everyday brand, but we pay $4 a jar for it at Aldi.

So even if you figure 10 percent of those last two items has already been used up, this is still around $17 worth of high-value baking ingredients—particularly handy for baking goodies that are vegan-friendly or gluten-free, as we sometimes need to do. And all I had to do to get them was take a slightly different route on an afternoon walk that I was planning to take anyway.

If we do anything particularly exciting and ecofrugal with any of these ingredients, I'll be sure to let you know about it in these digital pages. But for now, I'm just basking in the glory of my freebie find.

Ecofrugal Living podcast #12: Stuff Green People Like

Here's the latest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for November 14, 2010.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Ecofrugal Living podcast #11: The problem of too much space

Here's the lastest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for January 3.

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The problem of too much space

Over our Christmas vacation, we discovered a new show on HGTV called "Tiny House Hunters." In a refreshing change of pace from the original "House Hunters" series (and its two existing spin-offs, "House Hunters International" and "Island Hunters"), the prospective homeowners on this show are seeking less space, not more. They have various reasons for wanting to downsize: some are trying to live debt-free in a house they can buy for cash, some live a nomadic lifestyle and want a home they can take with them, and some are just trying to tread more lightly on the earth. Whatever the reason, they're bucking the long-term American trend against seeking more, more, more, by scaling back their belongings until they can fit into a home that, in many cases, is smaller than the kitchen at their old house.

As it turns out, this isn't the only show about the Tiny House movement. While trying to find out the schedule for "Tiny House Hunters," I Googled "tiny house show" and discovered two others: "Tiny House Builders," also on HGTV, which is all about the construction of these space-saving dwellings, and "Tiny House Nation," on FYI, which is like a combination of the other two: each hour-long episode shows both the process of constructing a tiny house to meet a family's needs and the process the family goes through to adjust to living there. Apparently, Tiny Houses are a pretty hot topic right now, and everybody wants a piece of it—which is an encouraging sign for a society in which the average new house is a whopping 2,600 square feet. (According to the environmental site Shrink that Footprint, Americans have more than twice as much space per person in their homes as the Brits and Japanese, and more than 3 times as much as Russians.)

Brian and I have now watched two episodes of "Tiny House Hunters" and two episodes of "Tiny House Nation" (which has full-length episodes available on its website and on Hulu). And after viewing two of them in a row last night, we've made an astonishing discovery: our house is HUGE.

Now, we've always known that our roughly 1,400-square-foot home (936 square feet upstairs and roughly half as much finished area downstairs) was a lot more house than we needed for just the two of us. We certainly could have made do with significantly less, if there had been any smaller houses on the market in the areas we wanted. But still, we've always been accustomed to think of our house as fairly modest in size. After all, it's only about half the size of the average new American home; it's smaller than most of the houses in our town, and even in our neighborhood; and there are a lot of rooms it doesn't have, such as a separate dining room or a formal living room. Yet after watching two episodes in a row of "Tiny House Nation" last night, Brian and I found ourselves wandering around the house saying, "Look at all this wasted space!" The designers on this show put Karl Champley of "Wasted Spaces" to shame, using every single square inch of space—walls, floor, and ceiling—and often putting the same space to multiple uses. In just two episodes, we saw a kitchen with individual induction burners that can be stored in a drawer and pulled out when needed, an entire office that folds up into a movable wall, and a Murphy-style bed that folds up into the wall—and then has a fold-out seating bench on the back.

This raises another question: if our house has so much room, why do we always seem to have so much trouble each year figuring out where to put all our Christmas presents? This year, for instance, Brian got a new air compressor—a small one, but it's still bigger than a breadbox, and it needs to find a new home in the shop, which is already piled so deep in stuff that it's hard to move around or find an empty surface to put anything down (or, once you've put it down, find it to pick it up again when you need it). Even if our house is small by modern standards, it's still got around 700 square feet of space for each of us; why can't we seem to find two square feet to store Brian's new toy?

At first, it's a puzzling question. But the answer actually became obvious to me while I was looking for a place to put one of my presents, a set of fluffy new bath towels. I opened up the cabinet in the downstairs bathroom and thought, "Gee, we have so many towels in here already, how are the new ones going to fit?" So I started pulling out the old towels, most of which hadn't actually been used in years, and that was when it hit me: We can't find room for anything because we have TOO MUCH space.

Yes, this sounds completely counterintuitive. But just think about it for a minute: when you live in a small space, you can't afford to hold on to things you don't need. You need to make the most of every available square inch, so anything that isn't being used has to go to free up space for more important stuff. But when you have extra space, it's easy to let things pile up. I didn't need all those extra towels; they aren't being used, and chances are they never will be used again. But on the other hand, there was no particular reason to get rid of them either, because we had the space. As long as that cabinet was sitting there, there was no reason not to hold on to all our old towels and whatever other miscellaneous linens we could find. There were curtains in there that hadn't been hung since we moved into this house; there were curtains that we'd never hung in any home and couldn't even remember where they came from; there were old shower curtain liners that were stained and had been retired in favor of new ones. But we hadn't dumped any of this stuff, because there was no need to—and consequently, when some nice, new towels that we might actually use came into our life, there was no room for them.

I don't mean to imply by this that I think Brian and I would actually be happier if we traded in our roomy, paid-off house for one less than half its size. After all, a house with more space has certain advantages, such as...well, more space. Sure, this house has more room than we actually need or use on a day-to-day basis, but if the plumbing unexpectedly goes out at my parents' house over Thanksgiving weekend, we can just pack up four guests and settle them in at our place with no difficulties. And when the Folk Project calls around seeking volunteers to host its monthly Home-Made Music Party, which can have anywhere from half a dozen people to over fifty, we can say without hesitation that we have plenty of room to put a big circle of musicians downstairs, fit in a smaller one (or two) upstairs, and still have room for folks to chat over snacks in the kitchen without disrupting the music. No Tiny House is going to be able to pull that off.

So I don't actually want to reduce the amount of space in our house; what I would like to do, instead, is stop using all of it. Because even if we do, technically, have room to store piles of linens that we never use, or repair records for a car that was totaled four years ago, or three old pairs of tap shoes that my sister and I used in high school, having these things in our home doesn't actually make our lives better in any way. They're just filling up space—which then isn't available for stuff that we could actually use.

So the first of my New Year's Resolutions this year is to go through every room in this house—every single room—and remove everything that is just taking up space. Stuff that could still be useful for someone else can be Freecycled; stuff that's worn or damaged, or that no one else wants, can go to the textile recycling bins. And stuff that's absolutely no use to anyone can just be thrown out—because while I normally like to avoid waste as much as possible, keeping garbage cluttering up my house instead of cluttering up a landfill isn't a solution. It's still garbage, it's just in the wrong place.

I'll keep you posted throughout the year on our decluttering efforts. I'm thinking of keeping a list of all the items I get rid of and how, updating it throughout the year to track our progress. By the end of 2015, I'll have concrete evidence of how much useless stuff I've sent on to a better life—and I'll also know just where I have available space for next year's holiday gifts.

Having a Freecycle blast

Lately, Brian and I have been doing a bit of spring cleaning. Our shed, which was nearly impossible to walk around in, is now probably the tidiest it's ever been. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a "before" picture to show you just how chaotic it used to be, but at least you can see from this "after" picture that it's quite neat and well-organized now. Whenever I go in there now, I find myself standing there for a few minutes just savoring all this room we have in there.

Most of the stuff we cleaned out of the shed eventually went back in, just in a more compact and well-organized way. But we did end up with several items to give away, so over the course of the past few weeks, I've been posting them all on Freecycle. I'd list three or four items at a time, and as they were taken, I'd remove the posts and list more items in their place. And since I was making all those posts anyway, I also started working my way through the box of stuff marked "giveaway" that's been sitting on a shelf in the shop for the past year or so, as well as listing a few other superfluous items. I actually belong to two different Freecycle groups, one for the Rutgers University/New Brunswick area and one for all of Middlesex County, so I started out by listing items on the Rutgers group in the hopes of giving them away to someone who lives close by. (I figure it's less wasteful to have the items picked up locally, since it involves less driving, and I also assume—or at least hope—that people who live nearby will be more likely to pick things up promptly.) If an item doesn't go within a few days, I'll post it on the bigger group, and if it still hasn't been taken within a week, I conclude that no one's interested.

Anyway, it occurred to me that this "Freecycle blast" might be a useful way to collect some data about what kind of items generate the most interest on Freecycle, and what kind are hardest to get rid of. As I worked my way through my pile of items, I kept track of what kind of response each item got: how many people responded, how quickly, and how long it took before the item was picked up. We still haven't completely gotten rid of everything, but most items have gone, including all the big ones, so I think I can go ahead and present my findings. So, here they are: Livingston's Laws of Freecycling.

• The items that are most in demand are useful, as opposed to decorative. A set of jumper cables, a beat-up old shovel, a half-full bag of dry cat food, a bottle of hand lotion, and an assortment of curtain rods all got multiple requests within the first 24 hours. By contrast, a glass jar for displaying a floating candle went several days before getting a nibble, and I still haven't found anyone willing to take any of our assorted mugs with cartoons on them (something everyone has too many of already).
• The condition of the item doesn't seem to matter that much. Whenever I post an item on Freecycle, I always disclose any problems with the item up front, because I don't want the person who picks it up to have any reason to feel cheated. Yet we had no trouble giving away a rusty old shovel, a digital camera that won't start unless its batteries are charged up to the brim, and a truly antiquated flatbed scanner.
• Bigger items are more likely to be taken on the larger Middlesex County group than on the local group.  Both the scanner and our old recirculating range hood got no offers when I first listed them, but when I posted the same items on the bigger group they were snatched up immediately.
• The more information you can provide about an item, the better. Of the two Freecycle groups I belong to, only the Middlesex County group lets you include a photo with your listing. However, I have discovered that when I post to the Rutgers group, I generally get a better response if I can find a picture of a similar item somewhere online. That helps people get a clearer idea of what's being offered, so that (a) they'll know if they're interested, (b) they'll know if they aren't interested and won't change their minds after seeing the item, and (c) they won't be disappointed with what they get. I also try when listing electronic items to include as much of the original documentation, software, cables, and other paraphernalia as I can scrounge up.
  
• In addition to being specific in describing the item, it's wise to be specific in stating your expectations about the pickup. I made one post offering three vintage glass ceiling light covers (see the photo for an example) with the note "please take all," and I still got two requests from people who wanted to take just one of them. Next time, I'll spell it out: "Please reply only if you are willing to take all three."
• It's best to avoid promising an item to someone unless that person can commit to a specific date and time for picking it up. Sometimes I've been kept dangling, waiting for a reply to my "So when should I expect you?" inquiry, while being forced to put off other people who asked for the same item and offered to come get it that very day. I used to give my address right away to anyone who requested an item, but lately I've taken to saying first, "Let me know when you can come get it, and I'll send you the address." I'm not as strict as some people, whose posts always include instructions to "include a date and time for pickup in your FIRST e-mail," but I might end up adopting that approach.

I'm hoping these rules will stand me in good stead when we finally get around to cleaning up the shop, which will probably be a much bigger job than the shed and yield an even larger volume of stuff to be Freecycled.

The trouble with free

It's been observed many times, and in many different places, that people often behave abnormally when they hear the word "free." Emily Guy Birken discusses the problems with "free" stuff in a recent post on the Live Like a Mensch blog, and behavioral economist Dan Ariely devotes an entire chapter to this phenomenon in his book Predictably Irrational. In one experiment he describes, college students overwhelmingly choose a free Hershey's Kiss over a 15-cent Lindt Truffle, yet when the prices of both candies are raised by one cent, they overwhelmingly prefer the truffle. A penny is still a trivial amount of money, but because it's not "free," it allows the students to perceive the transaction as a financial one and analyze the costs and benefits accordingly. He also talks about how Amazon greatly increased its sales when it started offering free shipping on all orders over $25—except in France, where it reduced the shipping charge on large orders to 1 franc (about 20 cents) instead of cutting it to zero. Even though this is still a negligible cost, it didn't have the allure of "free"—that tantalizing promise of getting something for nothing that can have the paradoxical effect of persuading people to spend more than they intended.

My own observation, however, is that the problem with "free" stuff cuts both ways. That is, not only can the promise of free stuff lead to poor decision-making, but an offer of a free item can also backfire on the giver.

Case in point: our old blender, which I listed on our local Freecycle group after we replaced it with a newer one from Craigslist. (Side note: I put the new blender to the test using this homemade Frappucino recipe, and I found that it performed admirably, actually doing a much better job of grinding up ice cubes than our old one. I also noticed that making this recipe with pectin rather than xanthan gum, which I couldn't find anywhere, doesn't seem to help much at keeping the drink from separating, but that wasn't the blender's fault.) Being a scrupulously honest person, I made a point of noting in the Freecycle listing that the blender's collar was cracked, so I feared that we might not get any takers. However, within just a couple of hours of the post, I received an e-mail from a Freecycler who said she was interested and could pick it up on Sunday "after 11 am."

When the Freecycler hadn't showed up by 2:30, I thought that the treacherously high winds we were having might have interfered with her plans, so I e-mailed back to inquire if she could still make it. She said she'd had car trouble and asked if she could come the next day "after 4:30 pm." Although I was a bit annoyed by her vagueness, I decided not to press for a more specific time commitment in the interests of getting the blender out of here. But as it turns out, it didn't matter, since she never showed up at all. Moreover, although she had both my e-mail and my phone number, she never bothered to contact me to explain why she couldn't make it this time.

Would this person have been so cavalier about her promise to me if she'd been proposing to buy the blender, rather than just take it for free? Based on an earlier experience of Brian's, I suspect not. Back when he was preparing to move out of his old apartment in California and move out East, he had to get rid of most of his belongings, so he listed several items on a message board at his workplace—some for sale, though at fairly modest prices, and others for free. The people who arranged to buy things, he says, invariably came when they said they would come, paid what they said they would pay, and left. However, the people who offered to pick up the couch he was giving away never came at all. He got multiple offers, but not one person actually showed up or bothered to send so much as a word of explanation. In the end, the couch wound up on the curb with the trash, because no one who promised to take it could be bothered to keep that promise.

This experience convinced him, and has since convinced me, that people just don't take a transaction seriously when there's no actual money at stake. If they've arranged to buy something, then they feel they have entered into a contract, and they won't break that contract without a good reason. But if they are merely taking something for free, then as they see it, there is no contract. Their reasoning, conscious or unconscious, seems to be, "Well, I wasn't going to pay anything for it anyway, so if I don't show up, it doesn't cost him anything." I suspect that if Brian, rather than giving away his old couch, had offered to "sell" it for a dollar, the people who offered to take it at that price would have showed up as promised with dollar in hand. (Of course, it's also possible that no one would have offered—but at least in that case, he wouldn't have had to waste time waiting around for a bunch of no-shows.)

The logical conclusion from all this might be that if I want to get rid of the old blender, the thing to do is to try selling it for a dollar, or some other nominal price, rather than Freecycling it. But since the majority of people I deal with on Freecycle actually do show up as promised, or at least give a good reason if they can't, I think it's worth taking one more crack at giving it away first. I've added a listing to the larger Middlesex County group, which reaches more people than the smaller Rutgers University group, and already I've had two requests for the blender. This time, I'm planning to leave the item out for "porch pickup" rather than try and schedule a specific time for the transfer. I'm hoping this will make the process go more smoothly.

However, it is rather interesting that two people (three, if you count the one who never showed up) actually want a blender that I candidly admitted is broken. True, only one part is broken, and it only costs about five bucks to replace that part—but as we discovered, it also only costs about five bucks to replace the entire blender with a secondhand one. It seems to be yet another example of the power of that word "free": people who wouldn't pay $5 for a secondhand blender will eagerly snatch up a "free" blender that needs a $5 part.

Thrift Week 2013: The Online Edition

Happy Thrift Week, everyone! This year, I'm planning to use each day of Thrift Week to highlight a different website that I consider a useful tool for anyone trying to live a thrifty life. And it should come as no surprise to regular readers that my first pick is my perennial favorite, Freecycle.

I consider this site the ultimate in ecofrugality. For anyone who isn't familiar with it, Freecycle is basically a network of small groups around the country for people to pass on their unwanted stuff to others who can use it. What makes Freecycle da bomb is that it's an ecofrugal three-fer, because you can:

1. keep your unwanted stuff out of the landfill;
2. get stuff you need for free; and
3. save the energy and natural resources that go into the manufacture of new stuff by reusing.

I first posted about the virtues of Freecycle three years ago, noting how useful I've found it for getting rid of any kind of item you no longer need, from furniture to books to empty cardboard boxes. (More recently, I have learned that there actually are a few things that even the folks on Freecycle won't take, such as my husband's old copies of Diablo and Diablo II, which have been on offer for over two weeks now without even a nibble.) Since then, I've posted several more times about the serendipitous discoveries we've made on Freecycle, from small (window shades for our smallest bedroom) to large (a huge pile of cement-block pavers that has been sitting in a pile in our back yard for nearly three years now. Seriously, we really do intend to turn into a patio someday—I'm hoping to get around to it this summer, in fact. We would have attempted it last summer if Brian hadn't hurt his back.)

If you're not already a Freecycler, it's easy to start. Just go to the main website at http://www.freecycle.org/ and type in your location to find a group near you. Not all parts of the country will have one, but if you cast a wide enough net, you can probably find one for your county, if not your specific city. Not all groups are equally useful, either; in general, you'll have better luck if you live in a city or other highly populated area, because you'll have a larger pool of people around to exchange stuff with. My mom says she has not had much luck getting rid of items through the Mercer County group, while I, living just a short distance away in Middlesex County, have found it very easy to get rid of most items (with certain exceptions, as noted above). I actually belong to two groups, one for Rutgers University/New Brunswick and one for Middlesex County as a whole; if I have an item to dispose of, I typically post it first on the smaller Rutgers group, figuring that I'm more likely to get a quick pickup from someone who lives nearby. If I don't get an offer within a few days, I'll post it on the Middlesex County group as well, and if it doesn't go after several days on both groups, I'll figure it's probably safe to assume that this is just an item that no one is ever going to want.

Once you join a group, you can decide how you want to be notified about new postings of items and requests for items. Some people choose to get a separate e-mail for each posting, which I imagine would only be practical if you live in a sparsely populated area where new posts don't show up more than once or twice a day. You can also receive a "Daily Digest" of posts, which groups together the day's new posts, 25 or so at a time, and sends them in a single e-mail. I use the Daily Digest for the Rutgers Freecycle group, since I'm more likely to be interested in an item if I don't have to travel far to pick it up. For the wider Middlesex County group, I've elected not to receive e-mails at all; if I'm looking for something specific, I just go onto the website and search for it directly. True, I may miss out on a couple of great finds this way, but on the whole, I prefer that to receiving a whole slew of posts every day for items I either don't want or don't consider it worth driving 20 minutes for.

Freecycle does have its frustrations, of course. Sometimes you see a listing for something you would love, only to find that it's already taken by the time you make your request; other times you offer something and can't get any takers; and most frustrating of all, you occasionally get "no-shows," who arrange to pick up an item and then never show up. (Our local group has actually started asking people to report no-shows to the moderators—presumably so that they can be educated about Freecycle etiquette and, if they still don't behave, kicked out of the group.) But on the whole, belonging to this group has been a major advantage to me in my efforts to live the ecofrugal life. I think anyone who is interested in saving money, helping the environment, or both should definitely check it out.