This week was incredibly plentiful. Just by getting a little aggressive on the craigslist Free board and paying attention to the dumpster behind our house, we managed to snag some seriously useful stuff for the business.
We needed a new filing cabinet (the better-looking one on the right has been our personal one for years) and got one from a lady who was cleaning out her home office. She even included a bunch of hanging file folders, which is great because we didn’t have any.
We rescued two tabletops from a dumpster in our alley. A home behind us is being renovated and we think it came out of there. I thought it looked a lot like a high school art table and on the underside, Chris found a Denver public school property sticker. We used one of the tops in our office to increase horizontal space. The other is in the garage, waiting for the basement to get cleaned out so it can be used in our boxing/shipping room.
The office, finally finished:
We got our first shipment of parts two days ago and have been tearing apart the basement to get ready for all of the inventory. I managed to find some free shelving on craigslist — actually, way more than we need right now. I haven’t decided if I’m going to put the rest back on craigslist to pass to someone else or hold onto them so they can be used when we move to a warehouse space.
I’m also not sure if the longest shelf will even make it into the basement. Our house was built in 1906 and the stairs to the basement are very narrow in both width and height.
One last thing we found in the dumpster: a giant rug.
It doesn’t appear to have anything seriously wrong with it, except for age. The Colorado sun is pretty brutal being a mile higher than sea level and it looks like this rug sat out for a long, long time. In fact, some of the fibers of the rug are turning to dust. When it’s cleaned up today, the rug is going to go on the floor of our shipping room in the basement. Our landlord laid down all new laminate flooring before we moved in and while we’re boxing, shipping and using other rough material down there I want to protect his floors.
The state of our shipping room right now:
Do you like the continuation of the baby-poop paint?
We have a lot of packing material we’ve saved on our own and then the rest that I ordered from FedEx. Those two blue tubs are filled to the brim with peanuts, bubble-wrap and packing paper. Using our stored materials should save us a few dollars in the beginning. The second of our art room table tops is going to go in here, on top of a square folding table we have.
The other side of our basement isn’t nearly as friendly…
I cleaned out most of our personal storage and found room for it elsewhere. The free craigslist shelves are going to line walls (thank jeebus for husbands and power tools). It will be easy to receive orders upstairs in our office, go downstairs and grab the item(s) off the shelf and then walk into the other room to box them up.
More to come as we make progress setting up the house!