The Friday 4: Best-ever Craigslist Finds

When you're livin' on a budget, chances are you're shoppin' on a budget. Even for the big stuff. 

That's where my good buddy Craigslist comes in. Brad and I have scored a lot of awesome deals through the site; in fact, probably half of the furniture in my house has come from there (I'm being serious). 

I can say from personal experience that Craigslist-ing can become quite addictive. And I've been known to go great lengths (see #2 below) to secure the perfect find. In addition to the amazing deals below, we've also snagged a 1-year old, perfect condition Broyhill micro-suede chair ($115); a matching Pottery Barn coffee table and two end tables ($125; they're in the pictures for #1 below); and a custom-made wooden console table (free!) that's an awesome addition to my office. But these next four are the truest beauties . . . 

(Disclaimer: all of these rooms need work and, in time, will get their share of TLC. Don't judge me!) 

4.  Ethan Allen leather couch 
     We paid: $300; seller paid: $3000 (it would've been more, but it was discontinued!) 

Focus on the luscious leather (ignore surrounding mess) 

This couch - if I do say so myself - is simply gorgeous. An uncommon color, sturdy, possibly the most comfortable couch I've ever sat on. I wish it had mates in the form of a loveseat and chair - not that we could have afforded the set if it did and not that we have any place to put them - but it's an ideal fit for our wee little family room. Oh wait, I think you're supposed to use the word "cozy" for things like that. 

3.  Broyhill Attic Heirlooms Windsor side chairs 
     We paid: $160 for five chairs; MSRP: $159 per chair (ahhh!) 

Look at those four happy chairs snuggled 
around an ugly table! 

I love high back chairs. We get compliments on these babies left and right. (I seriously think Amanda has said something about them every time she's seen them.) We only need 4 for the table, so the other's in the bedroom (where it matches pretty darn nicely) as a decorative accent. You really can't beat what we paid, and while they've got some dings and scratches, said flaws are barely noticeable and don't bother me one bit. 

The cheese chair stands alone 
(just for this picture) 

2.  Broyhill Attic Heirlooms hutch 
     We paid: $225 + the cost of gas (approx. $100); seller paid: $2000+ 

Our living room is giant (11' x 22') and any old media piece just wouldn't do: we needed something equally giant. Enter Broyhill's lovely Attic Heirlooms hutch, which is really a bedroom/dining room piece. (I have a thing for the Attic Heirlooms collection, if you hadn't noticed). 

Originally a black finish;
seller painted a creamy white 

Before Brad put the kibosh on this activity, I used to look at the Craigslist websites for the, um, surrounding areas. That is, if you consider 5 hours away, just across the New Jersey border to be a "surrounding" area of Pittsburgh. (Hey! I love a good deal! Cut me a break!) 

And what a deal this baby was. To transport it, we borrowed Brad's dad's super new Chevy Silverado (less than a year old - boy, was that nerve-wracking), drove all morning through the pouring rain, got lost about half a mile from the seller's house, then drove back through the rain with a giant 400 lb. piece of furniture not adequately covered in the truck bed. On top of all this, I was sick as a dog with a stomach bug, so I really shouldn't have been spending 10 hours in the car. 

Oh, but it was soooo worth it! Isn't it just gorgeous?! 

1.  Ethan Allen matching couch, loveseat, chair, and ottoman 
     We paid: $800 + U-Haul and gas (approx. $110); seller paid: probably b/t $3500 and $4200   

Doesn't the paint make the double windows just pop?!

For the first 5 years of marriage, Brad and I sat on a futon to watch tv. Yes, a futon. And for about 4.5 years, that's all the living room furniture we had besides a coffee table. We were living in an apartment then and had no money to waste, so it seemed silly to buy furniture that would eventually be too small for the living room of a house yet still be too pricey for our wallets. So we suffered with the futon (and I did a lot of complaining). 

Under Construction: everything to the right of the bookcase 

Just before moving out of our apartment - literally, days - we bought the leather couch (#1 above), but that thing weighs about as much as a small elephant, so we couldn't get it upstairs and never sat on it until we moved into our lovely house. But, as you can imagine, a couch is not quite enough furniture for a room with 222 sq. feet - even a giant couch like that one. 

So I looked at Levin's, dreamed about Pottery Barn, etc. etc. Eveything in our price range was too ugly. Everything lovely was out of our price range. Then, in October, about 2 months after we moved in, I found a whopper of a deal on Craigslist: enough upholstery to fill the room at a price lower than the cost of even a crappy couch. They're super high quality, and they were in unbelievable condition. These pieces suffered more wear and tear from me and Brad in 2 months than they did from their previous owners in the course of years.

This Old House + Zombies = Love

Just when I thought This Old House couldn't get any better (unless it stopped having so much crap about shrubs, plants, etc.), it got immensely better. 

I go to the website - unsurprisingly, thisoldhouse.com - and what pops up before me? "How to Protect Your Home in a Zombie Invasion." That. Is. So. Awesome. 

As you may have realized by now, I am not a little bit obssessed with our dear flesh-and/or-brain-eating friends. For them to be featured on the website of my favorite over-priced magazine, well, that's like a "Happy Summer" present to me. 

But there's more. As I'm feverishly clicking from "tip" to "tip," I stumble upon nothing less than a reference to the 'Burgh. Just. Got. So. Much. Freaking. Better. 

For those of you who foolishly will not click the link and see for yourself and then also see the other wisdom TOH has to offer, I will copy and paste below. But, be forewarned: if you don't look at their suggestions and the zombie apocalyse does happen, you've no one to blame but yourself. And, if I make it out of the attic alive, I will say, I told you so. Now go, and fight the good fight.

(from thisoldhouse.com) 

#4 Remember: Good Fences = Good Zombie Neighbors

Along with Pittsburgh's three rivers, the only thing that protected the living from the undead in George Romero's 2005 film Land of the Dead was a giant electric fence. Well, if it's good enough for the Iron City, it's good enough for your house, too. If you can't afford an electric fence, consider building a tough, tall chain-link, wrought-iron, or cinderblock version (at least eight to twelve feet high) around your property. The local zoning board might take offence, but, seriously, man; this is a zombie invasion. Who cares about zoning? 

A Girl's Gotta Know Her Limits

A long long time ago, in a land far far away (read: a little over a decade back, in the 'burb where I gew up), there was an over-achiever who spread herself so thin she got sick all the darn time from stress and lack of sleep. 

This girl tried to do everything. She was high school valedictorian (despite a serious hating of AP calculus). She worked out 3 or 4 days a week - when she wasn't playing volleyball 5 days a week. She wrote for the newspaper and was in the Latin and Italian clubs, as well as a host of others. She had a part-time job. She hung out with her buddies and did a lot of talking on the telly. Plus, she was Queen of First Dates (she wasn't really into second, third, etc. dates). 

Then our fairy princess went to college, got a boyfriend (guess what his name is . . . ), and learned about a certain thing called limits . . . . 

I can't say exactly when or how it happened, but somewhere along the way I stopped trying to be superwoman. I slowed down a little bit - not enough to smell the roses, but enough to see the roses in passing. It was a good choice. A crucial choice, actually. 

This comes to mind today b/c my plans for the next eight weeks just changed drastically - and, I believe, for the better - in the time it took to read 2 pages of a course syllabus. My German class starts on Monday and, since the creative writing class I agreed to teach got cancelled last week due to insufficient enrollment (major bummer), I signed up for a lit. class that would get my last area requirement out of the way. 

And while I wasn't looking forward to having a 3.5-hour class twice a week at the same time I'd be spending 3 hours M-F in my language class, I could NOT have predicted how awful the requirements for this literature class would be. The amount of stuff this teacher wants students to do is ridiculous for a 16-week course. But for a 6-week course? It's scandalous. 

Taking this course would, in theory, make my life easier eventually (maybe next spring - ? It's hard to predict these things). But it would make my summer hell. Which would trickle (or gush) into the fall and on and on. I know myself well enough to know that I don't need to "suck it up" when it comes to something this big and stressful; I need to make the smart choice for my peace of mind. 

In addition to this German thing hanging over my head, (do you see it dangling there, just out of reach?), Brad and I have a lot of relaxing and work on the house to get in over the next 3.5 months, and I plan on chilling out with my mom and my friends a lot. Basically, I want to have a summer. Not a condensed semester of torture. It's time to decompress and focus on other things. It's a well-earned break. 

Besides, I've already got plenty of "work" to do during these warmer months - writing my novel-in-progress and hopefully some short fiction, revising a paper from last fall, reading for classes this coming fall. That's enough, I'd say. 

Oh, and there's the fact that any prof who suggests a final essay for a course - 6 weeks or 16 weeks, I don't care - might be 9000 words is not a prof I plan on taking any time soon.

Humble Pie

Looks like that frightening, horrible thing Maryann made
Tara and Eggs eat in True Blood season 2 . . . yikes! 

I'm eating a big ol' bite right about now. 

So, I've been grading student papers for a few days now (very very slowly) and, for the most part, they're pretty impressive. Their ideas are sophisticated and well-organized; their introductions make an attempt to be engaging; the papers use good sources in a smart way and even seem to be getting somewhere with the dreaded Topic Sentence. And the students seemed to have grasped the need for evidence to support their claims and the difference b/t analysis and summary. 

Of course, this doesn't apply to all of the papers, but, on the whole, I'm pretty happy with what we accomplished this semester, and I feel like they've really learned something (hopefully multiple somethings). 

There are, however, writing habits you can't train out of people in 16 short weeks - for example, their beloved "From the beginning of time . . . " or "In all of human history . . . " statements in the introductory paragraphs. (Hate those.) Another bad habit? Relentless use of "is" and other bland helping verbs instead of interesting active verbs. 

But this post concerns not about a bruise to my ego for failing to be Super Teacher (I would hate that whole leotard thing anyway [though a cape would be awesome]). Instead it's about an ego bruise resulting from my own writing. 

While I should be grading, I've spent the last half hour looking over the article that I'm revising before returning it to the journal that has accepted it for publication. And what I've seen in this half hour of looking at my written-in-about-three-days-under-the-great-duress-of-a-looming-class-deadline essay is that the writing, well, kinda stinks. 

No, I'm not fishing for compliments (none of you have seen the paper anyway!) - I'm being serious. I pride myself, if anything, on my good writing, so I wouldn't say it wasn't so great unless it really wasn't. For instance, if the word "is" shows up one more time in that paper, I'm pretty sure the authorities are going to restrict my use. 

But that's not the worst thing I've found so far. The worst thing comes in the form of grammatical incorrectness and general non-sense-making-ness. The following isn't an actual line from the paper, but it conveys an appalling sentence structure that I can not believe I wrote and did not revise out immediately, let alone sent out for the world to see: 

The neighbor's attitude regarding Sally's new minimum-wage job suggests that having even low-paying employment can be viewed as being a hard worker, much the way Tony's willingness to accept a pay cut suggests blah blah blah. 

There are so many things wrong with that sentence - most notably the glaringly hideous mess pairing of "having" and "can be viewed as being" - that I shudder to think three people read (my real version of) it and had only to assume I thought it was a reasonable expression of my ideas. (Well, three people - at least three - other than me and Brad. Those were my professor, the journal's managing editor, and the outside reviewer). And the idea that this sentence could appear in a journal several pages below my name . . . 

The horror! The horror! (For all you Conrad fans out there.) 
It's okay if you're embarrassed for me; I'm embarrassed for myself. But I guess a kick in the butt is good every now and again, just so you don't get complacent (right?). 

Anyway, I'm gonna go work on that sentence, cut my students some slack, and try to get away from that awful offal pie . . . .

All Growed Up?

If being a grown-up looks something like this 

and my life looks something like this 

Don't let your mom see a kitchen sink crowded with dishes
when there's a perfectly good bathtub available! 

does that mean my 29th year isn't the year of my True Adulthood? 

It would seem so. 

In the 20 minutes preceding my mother's arrival at our house for my birthday last week, Brad and I scrambled around like maniacs to make the place look like somewhere reasonable, respectable people live. The results were a success, as my mother announced, "Your living room is so clean!" and "Oh, the kitchen looks so nice!" 

This is so not me. 

But, of course, I could not keep up the charade for .2 seconds: I said, immediately, "Yeah, we just did all this before you got here so it wouldn't look terrible." But she was unfazed - my mother possesses the handy-dandy (typically male) ability to not-hear when she deems it necessary. 

She also has the ability, and had even before retiring, to keep her house spic-and-span, in order, and generally pleasant. This ability was not passed down to me in the gene sweepstakes, and it's a darn shame. 

Every now and again, I get the cleaning bug, and when I do, Watch out. (Brad can attest to the ferocity with which that bug bites me 4 or 5 times annually.) But for the most part, I'm just like my husband: I live around the clutter and add to the mess. I'm just too busy to spend the time dealing with it or keeping the things looking nice in the first place . . . but then again, I manage to find the time for blogging . . . . 

So when does the adult attitude toward house cleaning commence? Are we talking 30? 35? 50? 

Serious Conversation I Just Had:

Brad (walks into living room): Like, if zombies ever do come, our only real chance is the attic. 

Me: Really? (Tries to register precisely where this line of thinking came from. Eventually gives up.) Like b/c the door's in the closet and they wouldn't be smart enough to look there? 

Brad: B/c they're not nimble enough to get up there. Like, the basement's not like a real basement* - b/c it's the bottom floor for the back of the house - and they could get in. (He mutters other things.) 

Me: I see. 

Brad: Like, if we could get up there and then kick the ladder away, they wouldn't be able to get up there. 

Me: They couldn't set it up? 

Brad: No, they're not nimble enough.** Unless they were - well, if they were that - that kind of - if they were . . . no, they couldn't. Hopefully we could grab the kitties and some foodstuffs beforehand. 

Me: Forget that. If zombies come, it's every kitty for herself . . . Could we sleep up there? Or would we fall through? 

Brad: It would be uncomfortable, but we could do it. (Explains the logistics: 2x4s turned on their sides, space b/t them, would need boards, there's a few up there, etc.) 

Me: Hmmmm, okay. Any other thoughts? 

Brad: No, that's it; I'm just thinking about it. I think about it more than you might think . . . (sees tub of gourmet popcorn Shannon ordered for my birthday sitting on bookshelf; opens it; peers inside) . . . You better eat this before it goes stale. 

Me: It's just a little. You can finish it. 

(Long silence; Brad eats popcorn.) 

Brad (finishes popcorn): And we might have a chance of getting on the roof - of the house - people could find us, rescue us. 

Finis.
______________________________________________
*The basement is a very real basement. 

**Obviously I didn't catch on to this the first time he said it.

Free Time? Eeks!

A big part of being a grad student is saying things like, "I wish I had time for fun things like that," or, "Must be nice to have time to sleep," or, "If I only had time to do something I actually enjoy, I would . . . . " It follows that when said grad student (for example, yours truly) gets that coveted free time, she will have no problem enjoying it and using it to do all those fabulous things she's been dreaming and dreaming of. 

True. Yes. Definitely. Except not always. 

As Brad pointed out many years ago, I am notoriously bad with free time b/c, well, I am notoriously bad at relaxing. I'm all, "Isn't there something I should be doing? I feel like there is" and "Don't I have some responsibility that I'm currently shirking by having fun?" Or, I feel like I'm not using my free time as wisely as I could be. (Yeah, Type A all the way!) And b/c it's in such short supply, I'm determined to make the most of it. 

Which then, of course, backfires, and half the time I end up frustrated and not having a good time at all. 

Surely a big part of the problem is that my brain never slows down. Never. Ever. It's part of the reason I am, like, the world's worst sleeper. If only I could do everything else at the speed at which I think (and the speed at which I jump to the worst conclusion possible) - I'd be unbelievably productive and accomplished. Alas, that speed doesn't translate at all. 

Don't get me wrong - I'm not completely up-tight and un-fun (although my friends and family might say differently . . . ). I definitely enjoy myself and chill out on a regular basis (see picture below for evidence of the success of Funday), but it takes me a good long while (hours, days, weeks - depending on the situation) to get out of overdrive and overthink mode. And right now, even as I blog, I'm thinking about all the other stuff I want to do/could be doing: 

looking at Craigslist 
playing Words Bubbles Rising 
playing Clue with Brad 
fiddling with our new Target purchases for the house 
hanging up the cool new lights we got 
napping 

and on and on and on. Maybe one of my summer's resolutions (?) can be learning how to relax like a normal human being . . . . 

See? I can have a good time