Suddenly Frugal Blog

It’s hard to believe it, but two months ago today, we closed on our dream house–and moved in. What’s not hard to believe is that, two months later, we are still living among the boxes. Little by little we are trying to unpack and re-sort our personal belongings so that they make some kind of sense in our new house. As we finish with a box, we toss it down the basement. Only problem is this morning I tried to get down to the basement but could barely open the door. If rabbits left alone multiply like crazy, then the boxes that we’ve left alone in our basement have been multiplying as well. Or is it true that we actually used hundreds of UHaul moving boxes for our move? Probably the latter.

With today being garbage day, I thought I’d break down some of these boxes and put them out with the trash. Why out with the trash? Well, our garbage company BFI/Allied Waste does not recycle cardboard of any kind–not even the cereal box variety–so I have to throw this stuff out. I’ve got it on my grand to-do list to figure out exactly why this company won’t take cardboard in recycling when our old company, Waste Management, at our old house did. Stay tuned on that mission. Our local school district participates in the Abitibi Paper Retriever Recycling Program, but they won’t recycle my cereal boxes and other paperboard there either.

Anyway, green got the best of me and I thought, wait there’s got to be a better way to get rid of these boxes without contributing to landfills. And there is. Craigslist. God bless Craigslist.

If you log onto Craigslist and visit the “For Sale” section, you’ll see all kinds of things that people are selling. (I’d blogged earlier about using Craigslist to sell unwanted items before our move.) However, I wasn’t interested in selling these boxes. I just want someone to come by, take them off my hands and, hopefully, reuse them. So I listed what’s called a “curb alert” in the “free” part of the For Sale section, and added the specifics of how many boxes, what size, and where and when people can find them (after 5 today in front of my house). Later today I’ll be schlepping these boxes out to the curb, and I hope that by nightfall, someone will have come by to take them away and reuse them.