on the level
In Our Inflationary Times, Craigslist Could Be the Answer
by Terry Meany
For just about all of us, it seems, life eventually leads one to use phrases beginning with “I remember when,” or “It used to be” or “Back in the day.” This last one I increasingly hear from people who seem far too young to be uttering it, particularly since the days they refer to took place within the past six months.
My personal favorite phrase is, “It costs how much!? That’s insane.” Strip away marketing and contrived values created by unseen contrivers and I am very hard-pressed to see, for instance, that a $255 Marc Jacobs tee is some how over 126 times better than a $2 t-shirt from my increasingly favored clothing purveyor, Walgreen’s. Marc Jacobs, it seems, is in the envious position of being able to command such prices for reasons that are a great mystery to me.
Bay Area real estate, of course, has fallen subject to the “It costs how much!?” question for years. Seven figures for an enclosed airspace with decades-old wiring, roofing, plaster and windows is more than a stretch for someone who grew up in Cleveland, where $150,000 buys a swell updated colonial with a flat driveway, happily independent of its neighbors. The term “tandem parking” is completely foreign there. Lake Erie will never be the San Francisco Bay, but the price comparisons are sobering.
All of these expensive bundles of sticks and stones and wires and pipes call for increasingly expensive labor and materials to maintain them, along with fuel surcharges to move everything along. Being he of the $2 t-shirts, I have no problem adapting repairs and building projects to any bargain materials at hand as long as they pass my requirements for durability, appearance, ease of use and safety.
Enter Craigslist, the online combination of an ever-changing garage sale and a Tangiers bazaar. Craigslist not only offers building materials and tools for sale at going-out-the-door prices; it also offers “free stuff.” Free isn’t always a bargain, but careful perusing and shopping can yield some surprising deals.
As of this writing, Craigslist’s free stuff includes, for instance, a mirrored closet door; various amounts of firewood; concrete, drywall and tile tools; pea gravel; used bricks; oak and glass display cases; gardening materials, including landscaping rock, sand, and gravel; armoires; a white picket fence in sections; light fixtures; and outside security cameras. What’s not to like? You get the items for free, they get kept out of a landfill, and you would have to drive to pick up anything you purchased new, so the driving is mostly a wash if the respective distances for new and old are about the same. But, there’s always a catch or two.
Anything free will have plenty of takers and some Craigslisters don’t leave phone numbers, just a first-come, first-serve missive stating you’ll find “it”—plywood, a used bathtub or a grand piano—in the driveway. Others don’t include photos, so the “clean decking” could turn out to be anything but. Used bricks will need some cleaning and the “50 gallons of good used paint” will redefine the term “good” into something both vile and useless. You might have to do your own removal of the item offered. Still, there are plenty of successful exchanges on Craigslist; if you’re willing to pay actual money, your choices increase and the goods become more useful.
Snooping around the “materials” section recently revealed a pair of vintage hardwood French doors with beveled glass and all hardware for $150. Snoop further and boxes of new wood flooring, vinyl windows, hardware, buckets of nails, marble slabs, granite slabs and used appliances show up with the click of a computer mouse. The usual caveats apply, meaning you’re responsible for scrutinizing the goods before handing over the cash. If a deal seems too good to be true—a new Maytag stacking washer and dryer for $200 that was only used to wash delicates and then only on Sundays—your “stolen goods” antenna should be buzzing. The occasional miscreant aside, Craigslist is a terrific resource for the budget-conscious property owner.
Go the Extra Mile When Handling Toxic Materials
Old buildings mean old building materials, including toxic ones such as lead and asbestos. Neither these materials nor their properties are anything new. Both the Greeks and the Romans knew asbestos caused a “sickness of the lungs,” but given its fun fire-retardant properties—it has been suggested that the Romans cleaned asbestos napkins by throwing them in a fire—they weren’t in any hurry to usher in labor and industries legislation. During the Industrial Revolution, asbestos was used to insulate steam pipes, boilers, furnaces and kilns; no one worried about its pesky health effects. Lead was one of the first metals used by humans. The Romans used it in plumbing to exploit its anti-corrosive properties and cooked in lead pots for its sweetening effect. Lead acetate or “sugar of lead” was eventually added to wine to make it sweeter. Alas, like asbestos, ailments appeared and were ignored (other than quarrelsome recordings by some nosey doctors).
How does this brief history of these nasty, but useful, characters affect you? Aside from the obvious and interminably stated safety precautions about lead-based paint and popcorn ceilings, old plaster and drywall compound sometimes contain asbestos as well. Zonolite Attic Insulation, regrettably marketed by W.R. Grace—regrettable because it led to criminal and civil charges and a field day for attorneys—from 1963 to 1984 also contained asbestos. Disproportionate ingestion of asbestos fibers can lead to respiratory damage.
Remodeling or repairs that call for cutting into or gutting out plaster or exposure to attic insulation of unknown origin can expose you, the workers and your tenants to any of the aforementioned nasty dusts. As an added bonus, old coal dust, which spread everywhere when coal was used as fuel, might also be stirred up. Will the occasional exposure have any health effects if reasonable precautions—appropriate dust masks, plastic to contain the work area, thorough vacuuming—are taken? Probably not (this is not definitive medical or legal advice, mind you), but try convincing a tenant of that.
What do you do? If you’re cutting out a sizable section of the ceiling, for example, go the extra mile. Tape plastic to the ceiling all around the work area and then to the floor below. Use a construction door zipper, a clever adhesive zipper that closes a slit cut into a sheet of plastic for easy in and out by workers while forming a tight seal. It beats using masking tape to keep the plastic sealed, even for small jobs. Use a HEPA vacuum to clean up during and after the job so that dust isn’t tracked into living areas.
There are HEPA vacs and there are HEPA vacs. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars here. The best job vacuum I ever owned was a Eureka Mighty Mite. I couldn’t kill it—not that I was trying to, appearances and work practices aside—regardless of how many drywall screws, plaster chunks, or splintered wood pieces I vacuumed up. It barely threw off any dust in its exhaust when compared with a shop vac and the Mighty Mite HEPA vacuum models will capture even more dust than the standard models. Mine lasted for years. Priced around $100, this is a wonderful tool for any dry cleanup work. Given that you will never have an extra vacuum bag when you need one, be sure to pick up extra ones when you purchase your vacuum cleaner.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the SF Apartment Magazine. Terry Meany is a former contractor and landlord. He is now a full-time writer and author of Working Windows: A Guide to the Repair and Restoration of Wood Windows, soon to be in its third edition from Lyons Press. He is cost conscious but not cheap, and he knows deferred maintenance always costs more in the end. He can be reached at tfmeany@msn.com. Copyright © 2008 by Black Point Press. All rights reserved.