Freecycle strikes again!

I just love freecycle. I live in an area with a fairly active freecycle group, and man have we used it! We have given away tons (yes, tons) of items and saved thousands picking up what we could use. And the best part is it truly lives up to it's mission - to prevent items from hitting the landfills! We have given away clothing, toys, baby items, furniture, appliances (both broken and working), you name it and we've probably given it away on freecycle at one point! We have received toddler beds (the cool fire truck and car ones!), a mini fridge box packed solid with baby boy clothes that carried us from size 9 months to 3T (clothing twins, it really really helped), a mandolin slicer, preK books, a wonderful train table, bulletin boards, school materials, an ikea toddler table and chair, seriously I could just go on and on.

I love the idea that instead of just throwing something useful away, you can find someone who the items will be useful to! Just today I freecycled a year's worth of our Popular Mechanics magazines. We are done reading them, but someone else who doesn't have a subscription was super excited to get them all for free! Our most recent pick up was this awesome pocket chart and stand. It was missing a screw and end cap, so I emailed the company and they shipped the missing parts to me free of charge, two day shipping no less!

I will say some items we have picked up on freecycle are being given away because they have something wrong with them - for example the train table we picked up was given to us because after minimal use a child stood in the drawer and broke the bottom of the drawer. We took the drawer apart (six screws) and took the broken piece to Home Depot. $4 later they cut a new piece to size for us, and bam - brand new train table. We asked if anyone had any wooden trains their child had outgrown, and we received a Brio bin overflowing with wooden train tracks! I went on craigslist and bought at least ten wooden Thomas trains for a buck or two each, and after a trip to Michael's I painted the chipped areas and clear coated them all - they looked brand new. So in total I probably spent $15, and maybe two hours of my time, and my twins have an awesome train table with more tracks than they really need, with a bunch of Thomas trains to play with!