Kashless

Today we moved Miss D into her new room. This left us with the problem of what to do with our guest bed.

Our first bed from when we first moved in together, the platform frame was gifted to us from someone else. The mattress was about 10 years old but it was a guest bed for about half that so it was in pretty good shape. The metal frame we were pretty sure would be gone from the alley in seconds if we put it out there, but we didn't know what to do about the mattress. I was pretty sure most goodwill/salvation army places will not take used mattresses. Did you know that mattresses take up a lot of landfill space? Most mattresses have a lifespan of about 10 years. There is actually a lot of recyclable material in mattresses but it is a difficult process to extract. Only a few companies are doing it in only a few states. It seemed a shame to add another to the pile, especially when ours was in perfectly usable condition.

During a quick google search i came upon Kashless, a brand new site that takes the Freecycle ethos to a whole new level. It is very user friendly although it had a few additional features that I didn't realize were available to me. Basically, if you are looking to give something away you can post it to Kashless. The same post can then be simultaneously posted to craigslist and freecycle sites in your area as well as be linked to your facebook and Twitter accounts (as you desire) Within 30 minutes of placing my listing I had 25 responses! We were able to get rid of the bed by the end of the day. The post was just as easy to remove as it was to list, and the responses stopped immediately.

A couple of nice features that I didn't realize when I posted. It's not clear- but the Kashless users can respond to your post. I didn't understand this so i left a phone number that went to a voicemail box- we got a number of additional replies to that and it was completely unnecessary. I got email notifications for all the responses and replied to them all individually but when I checked Kashless later, they also housed the responses and had a feature where you could reply to all at once. This would have made managing the process a lot easier if I had known it was available!

I would definitely recommend this site to anyone looking to give away unwieldy things like furniture or electronics. It was pretty insane to go from thinking we had something no one would want to fighting people off with a stick in 30 minutes!

As someone looking for free goods to obtain, it looks pretty awesome too. In addition to people who post directly to the site, it has software that trolls craigslist and freecycle for free listings and pulls them to Kashless. You can even set up searches and have Kashless email you when something you're looking for turns up. We could really use an additional laptop so i may be trying this soon!