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Sun, 18 May 2008 @ 11:10 || Desk Quest || WorkLast weekend I went looking for new office furniture. I've been wanting to replace the desks in the office for a long time now, almost since I got them. The were dirt cheap and served the purpose, but they were always ugly. After two office moves they weren't looking any better.I wrote a quick perl script to look at craigslist rss feeds and set it up as a cron job. It scanned the three lists local to me, or at least were I wouldn't mind driving to pick up desks, and emailed me the results twice a day. After two days I thought I had hit the gold mine. From the ad, it seemed like someone was liquidating an small office, he claimed to have several desks, bookcases, and lots of other matching furniture. I set up a time to go look at them on Saturday. Saturday came and Shane, Sukki and I took my truck up to Longmont to check out the desks. Once up there, it turned out to be false advertisement. They had a bunch of stuff, but none of it matched, or was that great. It was only 9am in the morning, so I figured we could hit the Boulder farmers market on the way home, I had another two places I wanted to check out, but didn't have the addresses with me. The farmers market was pretty busy, even thou it was windy, we bought some things at Elyse's friends stand, onions and garlic I think, some really good bread, forget the names, from another vendor. Once back at the house, I got the addresses of the other two places and we took off again. The first place was a professional outfit called Office Liquidators. We found two desks that were in my budget, one for the sales office and one as a receptionist desk. They don't match but they were in real good condition and of decent quality. When I was paying for them, they mentioned they had a 2-3 week delivery backlog. Neither desk would fit into my truck. I told them to set up a delivery time anyway, but if I could find a bigger truck, I'd be back that day. I found a U-Haul not too far away and rented a moving van for 4 hours. We arrived back at the office place and had them load us up. The U-Haul was fun, it had three buckets seats, so it fit all of us. I was hoping to make Sukki ride in the back, but she fit into the child seat between the two adult seats. Didn't take us long to get to the office. We were lucky that all the desk pieces fit into the elevator. The office is only on the second floor, but the desks were pretty heavy, being able to use the elevator helped a lot. Took us longer to figure out how to get power to the new computer locations given the new desk layouts. I really dislike daisy chaining power strips, but we got everything configured well enough. In a couple hours were we back on the road to return the rental van, got there with about an hour to spare. I left some bailing twine and some folded boxes in the van, they tried to charge me a $20 cleaning fee. There was a dumpster not far from where I parked, I asked if I could just throw the stuff in the dumpster, they said sure, and waived the fee. Beth was very surprised when she got in the following Monday, and has since reconfigured the rest of her office to fit in with her new desk. link to story || 2 comments || Add a comment |
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