keepin' it classy with curbside freebies

The prevalence (nay, tyrannical dominance) of beige in this city is one of my big pet peeves. The other? Thursday garage sales. By the time Saturday rolls around, the Thursday and Friday people have picked them over. This goes for estate sales, too. Why must you do this, garage sale people?!

So, Thursday coming home, I see a sign in our neighborhood’s entrance for a garage sale. Usually everyone’s closed up shop well before 4 p.m., but on a lark, I turned where the sign pointed. Then I didn’t see another sign at any of the cul-de-sac entrances and gave up and went home. About 15-20 minutes later, I get a text from Mike.

The thumb is for authenticity

Free! Do we want?

Um, yes? Even though we didn’t have a specific need, they were free and looked cool, so why not? Of course, that logic could lead us down a dangerous path of free-stuff hoarding.

Apparently the moving sale folks had decided it was worth more just to get rid of the set than try to sell it. But no one was home, so Mike wanted me to get the trailer unfolded and the plywood strapped on as far as I could before he got the few blocks home. Who knew how long this would last? Our saving grace would be it was on a cul-de-sac and the signage blended into the street pole.

I had the car turned and the trailer rolled out, so Mike just had to help me unfold. We’ve gotten pretty good at getting this thing down and strapped quick. We rattled off the down the street (the neighbors must be used to this by now) and the set was still there!

It’s a heavy, solid set. As we loaded the trailer, neighbors were coming home and giving us some weird looks. Hey, free sign. Someone's gotta reuse it. For Mother Nature and all.

We managed to strap things down fairly well, though if we’d been traveling beyond a few blocks, we would’ve used several more. Everything held together fine until we were backing up the driveway and a buckle came loose, so we had a chair dangling toward the edge.

Since we still needed to get the boats out of the patio and we didn’t feel like wrestling these down the stairwell, we went into avoidance mode and left the set on the trailer. But then come Saturday morning, we had to face reality, because we needed that trailer to go sailing on Sunday.

The chairs went downstairs easily, but the table was another matter. It’s heavy and a wee bit wide for the basement doorway. It barely fit through the garage door. We wheeled it across the kitchen and quickly realized that we were going to destroy some things (and ourselves) if we tried to wheel or carry it down.

Mike inspected the table and realized the top would screw off. So that’s what we did. MUCH better and no gouges in the wall or ourselves. So now our curbside freebie is hanging out in the basement with our barstools that no longer have a high island to sit at. The basement feels like the Land of Abandoned Furniture right now.

Hmm ...