Sorry I’ve been a bit MIA this week. I’ve been fighting a very illusive stomach bug. No, not pregnant, just can’t seem to get on top of this virus. Needless to say, the menus around here have been broth for me and catch what you can for everyone else. Nothing blog worthy.
In between dying on the couch and random cleaning spurts, I’ve been shopping. Craigslist shopping to be exact. I mentioned before that we bought the girls a bunk bed and Anthony a loft bed, well, I also bought a sectional sofa. It was on a complete whim. I wasn’t really in the market for a sectional but have always wanted one. Our current furniture is old-school Craigslist, AKA- yard sale, and well loved. However, I was browsing the furniture section late Sunday night and found a sectional.
It was chocolate brown, only a few years old, had a queen hide-away-bed and a recliner on one end. No rips, no stains, pet, smoke and kid free home. $200 and it was mine! The guy lived a stones throw away from my house too. It was the meca of the sectional couch search.
Until the next morning.
See, we picked this sectional up at 8:30 at night. So by the time we got home, moved our current couches out of the way and unceremoniously dumped the sectional into the living room, we just went to bed.
In the light of the dawning day, this is what greeted me:
A PINK sectional. Mauve to be exact, but pink none the less. Because of the colors in my house and the way the light filtered in, the color shifted from the chocolate in the top weave to the underlying color of mauve. Bleh! I’m all for outdated values but I draw the line at outdated colors!
I moved forward, rearranging with the help of an unsuspecting friend who stopped by for morning coffee. (Aren’t I a good friend!) Only, once I tried to arrange it in my house, it didn’t fit right. I did my measurements before I bought it and although it did fit, technically, it didn’t fit actually. If I centered it in the bay window, we were too close to the TV, if I moved it back farther, it was oddly off center to the window and looked awkward.
We tried every different arrangement we could think of and finally decided on moving it back the appropriate distance from the TV and off center in the window. Dedicating myself to live with it for a day or so I moved onto my next project for the day. By day’s end, I swear it got more and more pink. Plus, after a long day, we collapsed into it only to discover that it was not nearly as comfortable as we thought it was when we first sat on it.
Life’s too short to not love a Craigslist couch!
So, before my monkeys could slime it up, I reposted it the next morning. Remembering that the guy we purchased it from mentioned that we were the 5th caller in 15 min.’s since he posted it and that he had several more before he took the posting down, I decided to bump the price up a bit. I figured if it didn’t go for my asking price I could be talked down a bit or at the end of the week I could repost it for $200. With in 20 min’s I had a taker, after 3 hours, I had over 18 offers all willing to pay $350!
$350!
My final taker paid me $375 to deliver it to her. Her house, conveniently, was on the way to my in-law’s house where I had to return the trailer. So, I got paid to drive the trailer back plus, made $175!
I stashed the money away and have been trying to find the right sectional ever since. Guess what I found? The bunk beds we just bought for the girls:
(we paid $200) listed by someone else for $800! I sent the seller an email asking them if they’d let me know what the final sale price was. Two days later he emailed me saying he sold it for $750! Yea, sorry girls, your bunk bed are going back on Craigslist. Momma needs a $550 profit. I promise to buy you another one really quickly!
I think I found a way to finance my Starbucks habit! J
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