Selling it with Craig
I've decided to sell my Sauder big cherry finished executive-style desk (Model 2744). So, I advertised it as for-sale on Austin Craigslist.
Kudos to Craig for making it so easy. They have a simple, fast, free, effective system for classifieds. It allowed me to put in HTML directly and link to photos on my own site. So using HTML and a little embedded CSS, I was able to present a decent ad.
The ad was up for about 24 hrs (I removed it after it was sold and I had half the payment in hand), 1 pm Saturday to 1 pm Sunday. About 86 different people viewed it in that time. I was able to count the hits because the photos were hosted on my own web site and I could view the logs and count the number of unique IP addresses referred to those images from craigslist.org.
Two people emailed me expressing serious interest. Ryan was first and he's going to get the desk. He looked at it today and gave me half the cash. He'll have to arrange some way to transport it in the next week. I had to call Jane and tell her that someone else beat her to it.
This model is standing the test of time well. Sauder manufactures the same model today and says the average retail price is $450. Office Depot is selling it for $430. I bought it six years ago for $300 from Office Depot. It's almost as good as new. Better in some ways. One of the drawer fronts was busted when I bought it, so I had to get Sauder to send me a replacement (which they did promptly and easily). And the fool thing arrived in about 300 pieces. Some assembly was required. It'll be partially dismantled for transport to its new home, but nowhere near the amount of work required to originally put it together.
At $100, I'm giving this guy an excellent deal. I probably could've gotten a bit more (I didn't realize that the same thing was so much more expensive today than when I bought it), but 30% back isn't bad. I'll have to spend the money to get some filing cabinets to replace the ones I'm losing (that was one reason I originally bought that desk: three big, beautiful filing drawers).
In memoriam, here are the photos that I took for my ad:
