Free

Before I can get you excited over my exciting, FREE find from last week I have to tell you the story on why it was an exciting find… 

So we had been given a patio table and four matching patio chairs last fall by a family member. My sweet and wonderful husband (I made sure to add this since I am about to rat him out) had gone to pick up the patio set and bring it back to our house (just hours before the Halloween party we were throwing at our house). He loaded the table into the back of his truck but apparently did not do a very good job tying it down because on the drive back to our house it flew out of the back of his truck and hit the windshield of the car behind him. Thank goodness no one was injured (except for the windshield who ended up not having the best day) but the incident did make a supposedly free table suddenly become a very expensive table.

Long story short we have been without a table (and just with four chairs) since October. So, as you can imagine, when I came across a free patio table on Freecycle last week I jumped at the chance to be able to dine under the stars again (technically we had never had the chance before since the table never made it home). I called the hubs and told him to stop on the way home and pick up the table (it was a curb side deal which means the first person to the curb gets it). There was no picture on the listing and I had no idea what kind of condition it was in but having been without a table for almost 9 months I knew it was worth the risk.

Luckily it was still there come six o’clock when Josh arrived to pick it up. The amazing news? It was the EXACT table that matched our set of chairs and that had fallen out of Josh’s truck and shattered 9 months earlier. It was dirty but nothing a little soap, water, and spray paint couldn’t fix. So after making sure he tied it down extremely well this time, he loaded up the table and brought it home. We cleaned it up and WALLA! Better than ever!

Note: For those of you who have not heard of Freecycle before this post you are missing out. The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 5,041 groups with 8,960,179 members around the world. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by local volunteers and membership is free. To sign up, find your community here.