Indeed so. My wife and I were looking for some patio furniture … As far as I am concerned, I can get by with some basic plastic chairs, but here we were, looking for some anyway. I suppose there comes a point in time when “slumming” makes you look like an asshole, especially when co-workers show up and want to go outside to have a beer only to find out you own two plastic chairs found at some yard sale.

So I started doing my research only to get instantly terrified by prices of decent, sturdy cast iron chairs. Needless to say, those plastic chairs started to look pretty good.

Then I decided to hit Craigslist for estate and garage sales. After uploading the addresses to our trusty GPS unit, we jumped in the car and went weekend-yardsaleing. Though first three sales were pretty cool (I bought lots of used computer-related gadgets from an I/T guy who was moving abroad), we hit the motherload on the forth attempt: a storage unit blowout.

Turns out, an owner of a warehouse storage unit was trying to reach one of his tenants for weeks, while following a strict legal procedure of notification. After so many attempts to reach the tenant, everything inside the storage unit now belonged to the owner, who just wanted to get rid of it all NOW as he was losing income (since his tenant disappeared and stop making payments). It’s weird, but he said stuff like that happens all the time — people rent storage units, fill them up with their small business inventories, then move, go broke, or … die. As a result, the owners of those units just want the crap out of their storage units.

So we hit one of those sales. The inventory consisted of very Texified furniture — huge wooden tables, chairs, beds, mirrors, leather lampshades, country-style and wrought iron furniture, all really well made. After a quick bargaining session with the owner, we ended up with 4 beautiful (and very heavy) wrought iron chairs for $15 apiece.

Here’s all four:

The real crazy thing is the original and sale prices:

Original:

… and sale price:

Even if we found them at a hundred bucks apiece, which is a great price for those, we’d be out $400, may be $350. Instead, we drove out of there with good 120 lbs of wrought iron furniture for a mere $60.

Needless to say, perusing Craigslist is now my favorite weekend pastime.