I moved into a new house in Calgary a couple weeks ago. For the first night, all we had in this enormous place was one bed, a TV and clothes.
My roommate had sold all of his things at a garage sale before moving to Calgary from Edmonton in May, because he was just going to be renting a room in someone else’s house. All of my things are currently in storage at my family’s farm in Saskatchewan, since the room I moved into when I came to Airdrie was completely furnished. I didn’t even need to bring my towels.
Although I have an abundance of lovely furniture five hours away, getting it here was a problem, so my roommate took to Kijiji to try and find us some decent stuff to get us by until we can make the trip to Swift Current to collect my belongings. I’ve never really used Kijiji much. I browsed through when I was originally looking for a place to live, but never really looked at the selection of furniture and stuff. I’ve always been more of a garage saler.
Our TV actually came from Kijiji, which I guess was my first experience with the site. My roommate took me with him to check it out and load it into the truck for the trip to his bedroom in Mission. We’ve definitely gotten his money’s worth on that TV, playing video games and watching movies most evenings this summer. So I wasn’t a complete stranger to the site, and felt relatively confident that we’d be able to find something to get us by.
But it’s been even better than I expected. There is so much stuff on Kijiji. And people are basically just giving it away, just to get rid of it without having to haul it off to the dump. I was kind of blown away and a tiny bit overwhelmed. I let him do most of the searching.
Our first deal was a brown leather living room set – couch, loveseat and armchair. The set was in near-perfect condition and had virtually never been used. The friendly people we bought it from even brought it all the way from Airdrie to our new place in Brentwood, which was incredibly kind of them because it would have taken us at least two trips in my roommate’s Ford Ranger.
And I’m not the greatest moving buddy, really. He ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
We also scored a couple of end tables and a coffee table from them as well, completing our living room set. Sadly, the interesting shape of our cozy living room is making it difficult to fit all of our great new furniture in our house, but we couldn’t have asked for a better deal.
Earlier this week, my roommate found a listing for a king-size bed set, including an almost brand new mattress. The family was moving to a much smaller home and had no space for the bed they had just purchased. They were selling it cheap because they needed to unload it quickly before their move. We picked it up and brought it home in two trips, and then ventured to the deep southeast of Calgary to check out a second bedroom set – this time queen, to fit his mattress.
We brought home two more loads of furniture from Auburn Bay and spent several hours putting together bed frames, but by the end of it, we have almost completely furnished our new house for about $1,500. Our front room is still open, to leave a place for my much-loved mid-century furniture, but we have a livable home now, thanks to Kijiji.
Now, Kijiji needs to find us another roommate to live in our very large basement.
