Using CraigsList

Yesterday I read a very good blog post by Miss Mustard Seed with tips for using CraigsList to find great furniture for your home. I use CraigsList and love it. Just a couple of weeks ago I found a leather recliner to complete the seating in my living room - the same chair that I saw for $1000-$1200 new, I purchased for $300 and it's in almost perfect shape.

In Miss Mustard Seed's post she mentioned safety. If I were writing a post about CraigsList, my No. 1 tip would be the one about safety. My daughter started shopping CraigsList when she was in college in a small town in central Texas, when she moved to Houston and continued to shop, it scared me. The big city is no place to test fate as you may fail. So, take heed, be safe and if your gut tells you that something's not right, then drive right on by. And always take someone with you.

Aside from the great tips from Miss Mustard Seed, I want to give you the BEST CraigsList gift EVER. It's called CraigsEasy. Basically, you go to the website, get the EASY button (really the button is labeled EASY in my favorites), and then after making a search on CraigsList, you click the EASY button. That takes you to a page that shows you all the pictures on the listings of your search. You can scroll through all the listings very quickly by looking at just the pictures.

Now instead of the page looking like this and having to click the link to see the pictures:

It looks like this with listing after listing showing listing title and pics only, no text:

The listing title is a link back to the listing with the text. So if you're interested you can click into the listing then click your back button to go back to CraigsEasy. It's the best invention ever for CraigsList, it saves me a ton of time when I'm shopping.

Last tip I want to mention, if you live in a big city and you're looking for furniture, you may find that a lot of businesses advertise under the furniture category. And they dominate the space, you start seeing the same ads over, and over, and over again. I was really starting to get irritated because it wasted so much of my time, but recently I noticed that CraigsList added a "by-owner" or "by-dealer" option. Don't forget to use it, it's made a huge difference in the time I spend looking for what I need. I only use the "by-owner" option. There are still a few stubborn dealers who post under the owner option but for the most part, it's clean. Just click "Furniture", then up by the field where you type your search term you will see  - furniture: by-owner | by-dealer - click on the "by-owner" link and it will filter only ads by owners - no more dealers - YAY. This is a great new feature - thanks CraigsList!

I hope my tips, together with Miss Mustard Seed's tips, help you navigate CraigsList and find some fabulous deals to decorate your home!

Till later ~

Reba