Something from nothing

[Spirit Deer]

How come when I try to think of a really fantastic killer deal I've gotten, I draw a blank?

[dandj1958]

I got a yarn organizer a couple weeks ago for $1 at Goodwill.  (No, this is not me!)

It was like new except missing the handle and the dividers inside.  I figured for a buck I could play around with it and see if I could figure out something for dividers, and of course the handle was nothing to replace.  I thought about it for a while and decided two-liter pop bottles might make good dividers.  They worked out perfectly!  Six fit around the outside corresponding with the holes in the lid, and a seventh one fit in the middle, so I whipped out the trusty DeWalt and drilled a hole in the center of the lid for the center one.  Perfect!  I can get at least small two projects in that organizer and it keeps everything tidy and clean.

I love this yarn organizer!  All my projects are usually in a big rectangle canvas tote and when I camp, I have to be REAL careful not to get debris in my yarn!.  Your pop bottle idea will also work in my canvas tote.  Thanks for the great idea!!
Julie

[Spirit Deer]

See what I mean?  Nobody can think of everything, so it's fun to share ideas.

I also use those square-ish juice bottles in some of my bags.  Cut the side out near the top to stuff the skein of yarn into them, then pull the yarn out the top.  I guess you could do the same with the pop bottles.  I just cut the tops off completely for the organizer.  The rectangular bottles seem to fit better and make my bags less tippy.

I haven't taken my knitting and crocheting camping yet, so I'm not sure what's going to work best for me.

[aepowell]

I haven't bought a new lawnmower in the last 42 yrs.  I by them at Goodwill for 25.00, clean the carb and usually get 10 yrs out of them.  The last 3 were Toro  self propelled. My last grill was from Goodwill for 25.00. I've been using it for 3 yrs and its still in great shape.  My neighbor had one just like it and decided to junk it after replacing all the burner.  Guess who has extra new burners.

[beacher]

I haven't bought a new lawnmower in the last 42 yrs.  I by them at Goodwill for 25.00, clean the carb and usually get 10 yrs out of them.  The last 3 were Toro  self propelled. My last grill was from Goodwill for 25.00. I've been using it for 3 yrs and its still in great shape....

Some Goodwill stores get the good stuff, most get the C$%P!  In every big city there is ONE store that has the donated Weber Grills, notebook computers, flatscreen TVs, nice working lawnmowers,  etc..  The other stores get the scraps!

I visited my local Salvation Army thrift store during lunch this past Tuesday and found a Joos Orange solar charger for $1.00.  It was as dead as can be when I tested back at my office.  But I took it home and charged it overnight and it's working fine.

[chiefd]

We are not as handy as most of you so it tends to cot me a lot more to reuse/save items.  I have tried to fix some things around the house that I have no idea what I am doing.  So inevitably when I put it back together there are extra pieces or it still does not work   There does come a time for us when we just say goodbye to an appliance because of age and repairs we have already made.  For example our stove is 14 years old and we have spent $500 on two different repairs next time it will go because I do not want to put another 200 - 300 in repairs in a old appliance.  I figure once it crosses or get close to 20 years then its done.  I can at some point get a newer more energy efficient piece in its place. 

[ForestCreature]

I've been reading this nifty, thrifty thread. I can't resist a good recycle/reuse deal either. I love estate sales, CL and Goodwill/Salvation army.  We have 1 freezer off CL paid $25 a 7 CF ,it was almost new !
We don't need a huge one and that size was perfect. The other is a 5cf and it was an estate sale goodie for $10. Darn near all my CI came from estate sales.

As for making things, I don't sew like Rae. Matter of fact if my DH hears the word sew come out of my mouth he laughs quite loudly. But, put a power or hand tool in my hand and I'm more at home.

I repurposed 5 empty wooden wine boxes from sams and costco. A little stain (bought on clearance) a few nicely placed holes a few nuts and bolts and I have a nice looking display for my table at the woodcarving shows. I have pallets waiting to be dis-assembled to be turned into a rack for walking sticks. Cost for both, $2 for the clearanced out Qt of minwax stain and a few pennies for the nuts and bolts

I also made my own portable laptop dust collection out of spare plywood, stain and screws that were hanging out, and old pillow case. Cutting it out with my $2 estate sale jig saw. I did buy the fan new tho, it's super quiet and was worth every penny. Total cost $85, to buy one is about $250.

[Spirit Deer]

Half the stuff I do, I have no idea what I'm doing.  LOL.  Anyone who followed my thread last year during our kitchen remodel knows that. 

Love it, Marcy.  Doesn't it feel good to take a pile of junk and make something cool from it?

Years ago now I picked up a narrow kitchen cabinet that was missing the bottom drawer.  I paid a dollar for it, took it home, cut the bottom off, and voila, instant end table for the living room, with three good-sized storage drawers for desk items like pens and note pads, craft projects in progress, and our gardening info.  It needs a paint job now but it's sure been worth the dollar I spent on it.  My husband is one of those people who sees what is, not what could be, and didn't want me to buy it.  Once it was done he changed his tune!   

Our regional thrift stores usually offer pretty good merchandise.  Our Goodwill only opened in September.  It's been great!  None of them in our area accept electronic stuff because people were dumping old broken stuff the stores then had to pay to get rid of.  And that's the definition of truly being cheap, people who donate their trash so they don't have to pay the dump fees for it.  Unbelievable.  The big hub in Duluth, which we don't get to often, is where the less-than-nice stuff ends up.  I love shopping there.  I got a like-new Crock-Pot for $5 there because it was so dusty I hated to even touch it.  But since I own soap and water, I took it home and still appreciate the bargain.  I got the base for my big DO table there for $3.  I'd have never found that anywhere else.  I got the tray for the top at a rummage sale for fifty cents.


I've gotten most of my CI secondhand too, except for the camp DOs.  Most of those are very HTF although I did get a Lodge #10 and Lodge #12 for a combined $10 at garage sales, and a big collection of rusty brat cookers and Pie Irons for $1.

I got my bread machine for $2.  It included two unopened fancy bread mixes that sell for $3 each in grocery stores.   

[austinado16]

We have a big Goodwill hub here too, as well as one of their stores.  The hub keeps all the "junk" and all the donated cars.  The store has the nicer stuff.  My fantastic 1954 6qt Presto pressure cooker came from the store for a couple bucks.  I've purchased 3 vehicles from the hub.  One was just to fix and sell, the other 2 were our family cars.  One of those I used to work on when it was new, and I recognized it on first sight and bought it immediately.  It was pretty rare, and I used to offer the owner that if she ever wanted to sell it, please let me know.  That was years and years prior.  Of course the Suburban is our other Goodwill purchase.

I always find interesting stuff at the hub.  Once, they had a very early Amana Radarange. They are super collectible in the retro kitchen world, so I snapped it up for $5.  The door was out of adjustment, and that's what was keeping it from working.  It sold to a collector in NY City a week or so later, to be used in a movie, and then kept by him......for $325 plus $100 for shipping.   I followed that up similarly, with one for free sitting on a curb in town, and another on the local CL for $10 and sold both to collectors for similar prices.  One guy flew his plane here and I met him at the airport and helped him load it!

Another fun one was a 1950's Mangle Iron for $5 at the Goodwill.  It's now ironing huge set curtains and the fabrics used to make them, and the actor's clothes, up at a huge theater in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You never know what you're going to stumble across!

[Brian]

We are not as handy as most of you so it tends to cot me a lot more to reuse/save items.  I have tried to fix some things around the house that I have no idea what I am doing.  So inevitably when I put it back together there are extra pieces or it still does not work   There does come a time for us when we just say goodbye to an appliance because of age and repairs we have already made.  For example our stove is 14 years old and we have spent $500 on two different repairs next time it will go because I do not want to put another 200 - 300 in repairs in a old appliance.  I figure once it crosses or get close to 20 years then its done.  I can at some point get a newer more energy efficient piece in its place. 

In general I agree that modern appliances are more energy efficient and there does come a point of diminishing returns, but often being able to get the remaining utility out of something saves more money than energy efficiency ever would, as well as keeping something useful out of the landfill.

Like you, appliance repair kind of scares me and when we lived in Texas, I had an appliance repair shop that I used a few times that treated me fairly. Last year when were in Illinois, our 5 year old dryer suddenly stopped getting hot. We have a large family, so we tend to buy the largest capacity appliances with the most features and this dryer was a good example of that. It had touchpads, digital display and computer control board. All of that really made me worry that if I just changed the obvious part, heating element (my "shadetree" auto mechanic background and training") I could end up spending a lot of money, and more important time, remember 7 people's laundry was piling up .

Since I bought it at a Sears "scratch and dent" store. like all my other appliances and it happened to be a Kenmore Elite as well, I got on the parts website and found links to a tremendously helpful repair database Sears maintains of repairs for all the appliances they sell. I was able to do research and they also had a board I could join to chat with an actual technician online. Through that process I walked thru the process of checking continuity with my $5 Harbor Freight multimeter and isolate the heating element as the problem.

$80 (including tax and shipping) and an hour or so of labor later and my $700 dryer (retail, I paid $400 originally) was doing it's job again.

Brian

[Spirit Deer]

Todd, you find the best deals.  We don't have CL here and no curbside trash either.  All we have is Freecycle and nobody gets rid of really great stuff there.

I'm hoping my broken dishwasher will be fixed with the part that's coming on Monday. 

[austinado16]

Having nothing but vintage major appliances, I can attest to the fact that modern stuff is barely any more efficient, if at all.  My 1952 Philco refrigerator has never been serviced and was running find when we found it in a 2nd hand store.  All I did was take it apart, reverse the door mechanicals, hinges, and relocate the "beer tap handle" style door opener to the other side, and have it repainted.  $200 for it and $300 to have it painted.  20 years later, it's still running.  It doesn't defrost, and because it's walls are about 3" thick and packed with insulation, it rarely runs.  I actually purchased one of those "Kill-A-Watt" meters and tested it, and the 1957 GE under counter freezer and some of the other stuff we have.  It's silly how little electricity they use.

Our 1953 washer and dryer are front loaders, and use very little water....just like the new wiz-bang front loaders that have become all the rage in the last 10 years.  They were $25ea at the Goodwill, and yes, I did have to spend a little money on each of them.....like maybe $150ish in the last 16 years.

Our 1959 Kitchen Aid dishwasher doesn't preheat the water, or run a massive heating element to dry the dishes, so again, very little electrical consumption.  It's entire cycle is about 30min, and that's 1 wash and 2 rinse cycles, plus the dry cycle.

The 1952 Wedgewood gas cook stove is just as efficient as a modern stove, because I redid the plumbing to the burners, and it no longer has those monster pilot lights running 24/7.  It was $75..........but I did spend a grand on "Show Chrome" chrome plating for the chrome work on it.  At the time, to buy a big restored one like ours would have been $3,500.  I've got $1,075 in ours and it'll still be in use when our great-great grand kids are around.

It's been fun to watch my inlaws go through modern appliances in the past 20yrs.

[Brian]

Having nothing but vintage major appliances, I can attest to the fact that modern stuff is barely any more efficient, if at all.  My 1952 Philco refrigerator has never been serviced and was running find when we found it in a 2nd hand store.  All I did was take it apart, reverse the door mechanicals, hinges, and relocate the "beer tap handle" style door opener to the other side, and have it repainted.  $200 for it and $300 to have it painted.  20 years later, it's still running.  It doesn't defrost, and because it's walls are about 3" thick and packed with insulation, it rarely runs.  I actually purchased one of those "Kill-A-Watt" meters and tested it, and the 1957 GE under counter freezer and some of the other stuff we have.  It's silly how little electricity they use.

It's a really good point. I have a 1957 GE fridge on the deck at our house in Texas that has exactly one moving part, the compressor. There is no fan moving air around the box and no defrosting, so it just does a great job with little electricity and not much that can break. Simplicity of design is efficient in and of itself.

BTW, I know it's a 1957 model because the family friend who traded it to me for a microwave oven, got it as an anniversary present from her husband in 1957 .

Brian

[BirdLand]

We have a lot of recessed ceiling lighting in our house (kitchen, dining room, living room, mudroom, laundry closet, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms - about 40 fixtures total.)  DH is a commercial/industrial electrician; all these fixtures have been salvaged from jobs that he's done that involve renovations based on fashion rather than function.  He had permission to trashpick them; we got a bargain as they look nice and didn't cost us anything.  We got our clawfoot bathtub the same way (when Swarthmore College was 'modernizing' a dorm).  Many of my lamps were inherited from my paternal grandmother; it only took some minor parts replacements to restore them to working order.  My bedroom set and dining room set was inherited from my maternal grandmother; it cost me about $20 in fabric and 30 minutes watching YouTube to figure out how to replace the upholstery on the dining room chairs.  I received 18/8 stainless flatware as an engagement gift, yet the flatware that I inherited from the Grandmoms is much sturdier.  My mom still uses the pots and pans inherited from my maternal Grandmom; they are US-made RevereWare and are still holding up great; we buy the same for our household.

Every little bit helps.

[Spirit Deer]

Gotta love a good freebie!

I picked up a like-new food dehydrator Thursday at GW for only $10.  As near as I can figure it must have cost about $80 new.

Today we found a 7" tablet on a clearance sale at a retail store, plus we had a 15% coupon on our entire order so we got it for $64.  My husband wanted a color Nook for $300 and that just didn't make any sense.  He's been playing with the new one all afternoon and really likes it so far.  The nice case and screen protector were deeply discounted, too.  Lucky find!