What worked best for us was using Craigslist, which if you don’t know by now, is an online bulletin board for buying and selling and dating and swapping and getting a job and more. Craigslist divides its boards by geography so that if you’re looking to buy or sell something locally, you can search on the Craigslist nearest to you.

According to Craigslist protocol, when you’re selling something, the buyer and seller meet at a mutually agreed upon location to complete the deal. There’s no shipping involved. This cuts down on the schlep factor for both parties. Also, there’s the convenience factor. I knew that I didn’t want to travel far to get rid of my stuff, and I knew that my buyers probably felt the same about buying.

The first thing I successfully sold on the “For Sale” section of Craigslist was a Fisher Price plastic toy box, which we must have had for 10+ years. My children had long outgrown it, and after a good washing, it was ready for a new home. I brought the box outside to take a digital picture of it—ads sell better with well-written descriptions and good-quality pictures—and within a day, I had a dad of toddler willing to give me $20 for something that had been sitting in my basement for over a decade. We agreed to meet at a public park, where my older daughter happened to be having a softball game one Friday evening, and found each other via cell phone. I practically skipped back to the softball game, with the crisp $20 in my hand, the transaction was so easy.

Our next Craigslist sale was our wooden playset. Built to look like one of those roadside Taj-Ma-Playgrounds you see for sale these days, my husband actually constructed it of scrap lumber, albeit pressure-treated scrap lumber so it would hold up to the elements. Again, I took a digital picture of the playset, plus provided its dimensions in the ad so people would have a sense of whether or not they need to rent a truck to take it home. (It was too big to fit in the first buyer’s extended cab pick-up truck so he went home empty-handed.) In this instance the buyer had to come to our house for the transaction, and I just made sure that, for safety’s sake, that it was daylight and my husband was home when they came by. A local family, which did rent a truck, paid $75 for the playset.

The last thing we sold before our move was an old gray filing cabinet I’d had since graduating from college. For a young single person just starting in the writing business, this clunky, musty filing cabinet worked just fine. But once I set up a real home office, that filing cabinet got demoted to the basement, which is where is stayed for eight years. With the move on the horizon, I knew I didn’t want that cabinet coming with us. So again I turned to Craigslist and, long story short, a twenty-something came to my home late one afternoon, and paid me $15 to take away a filing cabinet I was planning to throw away.

All told I made over $100 on stuff that I considered to be junk. These days I’m looking around the house, which is still overflowing with boxes, and wondering what else I could sell on Craigslist to bring in some extra cash.

Interestingly, soon after this experience, I discovered that my writer friend Jen Miller wrote an article on turning clutter into cash. That article appeared in the June 19, 2007 issue of Woman’s Day magazine. Like me Jen is a big fan of Craigslist but she’s also discovered some other online venues that are worth checking out when you’re looking to get rid of unwanted items. Some of those venues that she writes about in her story, which I never would have consider for unloading unwanted items, include Oodle.com and Half.com.