“Hit The Streets at Strategic Times to Capture Castoff Moving Booty [Frugality]”

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Hit The Streets at Strategic Times to Capture Castoff Moving Booty [Frugality] Posted: 17 Jun 2010 06:51 AM PDT Sign up for the Lifehacker Daily and get one great story in your inbox each day. Join Lifehacker on Facebook. Click "Like" to get the most important stories in your News Feed. Furnishing a one bedroom apartment with entirely free furniture sounds impossible but if you know when to hit the streets you can find piles of free furniture and household goods destined for the landfill. Grant Stoddard, writing for New York Magazine, wanted to see if you really could furnish an apartment just with moving day castoffs. He rented a truck, charted a scavenger's course through the city, and scored an entire moving truck full of loot. The big secret? Knowing when to look. The best time to forage is the first weekend of any month, when most people move and are likely to cast out unwanted stuff. I posted an ad on Craigslist, offering a few hours' rent for an empty one-bedroom to use as my blank canvas. Tassanee Boonmongkol, a Boerum Hill resident and owner of the Thai restaurant Tuk Tuk, responded in a matter of minutes. Then I reserved a rental truck (no easy task, as it turned out). There are a few important points to remember when shopping from the sidewalk. "Do I really want this item? Is it practical? Will it fit?" should be the guiding principles. Once you have answered yes to all of these, take a moment to check that the object of interest is actually being tossed and that it's not infested with anything nasty. Aside from the cost of the U-Haul rental and a couple basic cleaning supplies to disinfect and tidy up the loot, they managed to furnish the entire apartment above the Thai restaurant and though eclectic it was nice enough that the owner requested they leave it instead of hauling it all away. Check out the full article at the link below for more tips and photos of the furnished apartment. Have your own tips for successful scavenging? Let's hear it in the comments. Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

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