Recycla and her family will be moving in about eight months and she is already trying to deal with the STUFF that has accumulated in her basement, attic, and assorted closets in the nine years she’s lived in her current house.
Recycla has hauled boxes of books to the local library to be donated for the next major book sale. She has donated boxes and bags of items to a charity like Goodwill. She has also gone through her children’s closets and put together a large pile of outgrown clothes to give to a friend whose child is just the right size. And she is trying to convince her children to give away or sell some of their toys, even if it’s just one single Barbie.
One other way Recycla has been dealing with all this clutter is to post items on Freecycle.
If you aren’t familiar with Freecycle yet, Recycla encourages you to become so. Freecycle is a global network whose mission is to keep stuff from ending up in landfills. All transactions are money-free; Freecycle is all about FREE stuff and selling items is forbidden.
Have a mattress you don’t need or a bike your child has outgrown? Just go to the website linked above and search for the group located closest to you — there are thousands of them. After a quick registration process, you can start posting for things you want to get rid of or things you are trying to find. The chances are quite good that the mattress or bike (or whatever) will be off your hands and out of your house within hours.
Getting rid of stuff is usually easier than finding what you need, but it really depends on what you’re looking for. Recycla once needed a small piece of lattice for a project, but didn’t want to buy a large sheet of lattice. She put a request on the Freecycle network and got an email almost immediately.
Last week, Recycla posted two bikes her children had outgrown and a bed frame on Freecycle. Within ten minutes, she emails from interested parties and within a few hours, all posted items had been picked up.
There are rules about what can and cannot be posted on Freecycle. For example, some groups allow offers of kittens and puppies, but others do not. There are also some basic courtesies that need to be observed, such as if you say you’re going to pick up an offered item, you need to actually follow through. (This is one of the biggest gripes Recycla has seen posted on her local network.) That said, Recycla herself has never had a problem with this and has always found the process to be super easy.
Now if only Recycla could figure out what to do with her husband’s Little League trophy from second grade…
Graphic courtesy of Freecycle.org.
