We got a new bed, smaller than the old bed - Husband put the old wood frame out at the curb yesterday around three. Some neighbour was excited to see free stuff, and picked it up around six
We have (had) a set of four ‘principal’s chairs’ for some unknown reason. Husband put two of them out at the curb just after he put the frame at the curb. They disappeared before the frame did.
We went through the cookbooks. This is always a fraught task, being two combined houses, where I always feel he wants to get rid of my shit, and he feels I want to get rid of his. Instead of going through and figuring out what to get rid of, we flipped it and each pulled out what we wanted to keep. We recycled a metric tonne of old magazines, filled a box for donation, and have about half the number of cookbooks left. There are three cookbooks on the island that I need to photocopy a page out of each tomorrow, then they can also be donated. I’m not keeping a whole book for one recipe. I have a binder with page protectors and printed off recipes in it, so I will add the photocopied pages to that.
Records - we had a motley assortment of records, some from my childhood, some from his, and some that were left in a rental when we took possession. They filled a milk crate plus a small stack. We are down to a small stack now (yes, we do have a record player).
But I did manage to get rid of a ton of small empty boxes from our store room (from when we changed all the light switches), about 30 different hair ties, headbands, and clips that are overstretch or otherwise worn out, and about 20 paper crossword and puzzle books that were all 90% complete from more than a decade ago.
I just really really want less inventory to deal with in this house, but I also need to figure out how to stop shopping!
I may have bit off more than I can chew, energy wise. Still, a bunch of recycling (formerly “precious baby toys” lol) has been disposed of, some stuff moved to more appropriate homes, categories lumped into baskets (party supplies, art shit), and some bday decor listed on buy nothing (for the second time- I hate just throwing perfectly good stuff away though). Now I need to figure out what to do with 700 ribbons and strings who have all, individually, caused massive toddler obsession and boundary pushing in the past
I have two “uuugh” baskets that sit next to each other, it’s useful because there’s definitely times later on that I’m like “I have no idea where this thing goes” and I’ll put it in that basket. How are there so many random things that don’t seem to fit into any category? There’s a lot of them and yet they don’t magically have something in common to make them a category of their own aside from a nonspecific shrug vibe.
This seemed somewhat relevant to this group. Even as someone who spent a year as a regional admin (back in 2017 or 2018 though), this is WAY more context than I had. Super interesting to read these details.
Whoa. I didn’t really think about all the money involved in creating the app. They’ve put so much work into this, and it’s benefited so many people, that I do hope they can get some kind of monetary benefit.
The truth was that turning Buy Nothing into a business had come with far more expenses than revenues.
This seemed kind of obvious, especially if they ruled out targeted ads. And with ads, hard sell to actually use the app.
I can absolutely see how they’re between a rock and a hard place. I also think they handled it all really poorly. The communication around all of it was atrocious. They made a community, empowered and leaned heavily on volunteer admins, then withheld info a ton from that community. The whole situation is very clunky- I’m sure some people would have been hurt no matter what, but it was the sheer confusion that I think got to a lot of people who otherwise weren’t going to have a strong opinion one way or the other. That sense of “wtf is going on” is part of why I stepped down as admin.
I just desperately hope it all keeps existing in some form. It’s been such a wonderful thing in my life. Still is.
Yeah, I can understand wanting to move away from Facebook, but I’m not sure how they weren’t expecting that app development, hosting, all of that costs money, and it’s not necessarily the sort of thing a venture capitalist is going to be interested in since the point was to keep the communit(ies) going rather than turn a profit (or at least that’s how I read it). And while I could see donations maybe working, I don’t see how you try to roll something like that out unilaterally without involving the people doing the actual administrations. Not that someone wouldn’t have been outraged anyway, but getting some feedback and buy-in at the start would probably have gone a long way.
Made some basement progress! Threw out a trash bag’s worth of stuff that I accepted is trash, and took four (!!) small moving boxes worth of stuff to Goodwill, mostly clothes with some dishes and house stuff. I feel so free
Got rid of two water bottles and a homemade riser I used to keep paints on.
Also managed to get rid of a number of small kids toys, stencil, old craft material.
Not much progress, but better than nothing.
I have 3 kids coats up on buy nothing and so far no takers. I think I’d rather store them for next year to go to coats for kids rather than go to goodwill now, as I assume they’d be trashed.
Sold a double stroller that I bought used for same price. I have one more to post for sale this week. Sold a baby bouncer too. The money is nice but freeing up the space is even nicer.
