for sale

  • Stickley on Craigslist: December 11, 2007

    This is so much easier now that I can collect these listings automatically! As usual, I make no guarantees as to the authenticity of any of these items – be careful (and note that some items described as "Stickley era" or "Stickley style" do get through the filter – I try to remove them by hand but once in awhile leave the item in if I think it’s nice enough or interesting):

  • gorgeous 1400 sq ft bungalow in Sacramento: $595k

    3rd_front
    Yes, the price is obscene. But the house is gorgeous. Beautifull restored kitchen & bath, great (small) backyard, lots of light and in one of Sacramento’s three nicest neighborhoods, this Curtis Park bungalow can be yours for just a bit over a half million dollars:

    Beautifully restored shingle Craftsman on idyllic West Curtis Park
    street. A large lot with 3 car garage and alley access – this home has
    been meticulously restored. The period appropriate kitchen renovation is
    complete with handmade shaker style cabinetry with inset doors and
    solid wood construction. The ’50s era Wedgewood stove is also restored,
    and the rest of the appliances, including a Bosch dishwasher, are
    completely integrated into the design of the kitchen. Soapstone
    countertops, a full pantry, and plenty of open shelving throughout. A
    central vacuum system makes cleaning a breeze!

    3 bedrooms, 1 bath, approx. 1460 square feet. Newly refinished
    hardwood floors throughout, along with a new 30 year composition roof,
    new copper plumbing, restored original windows, automatic irrigation,
    new HVAC, and more!! There is a partial basement which is great for
    storage. The 3 car garage is currently set up for a woodworking shop-
    the garage door is for a 2 car garage, but there’s plenty of extra
    space inside!!

    Many custom touches including master bedroom with built-in maple closet
    cabinetry and pull-out ironing board- sliding barn doors for the closet
    too!

    Front and backyards are completely landscaped, there’s even an
    outdoor kitchen! Cook and dine outside next to the gentle sound of the
    koi pond waterfall. Much, Much, More… Call for more details!!

  • tools for everyone!

    I’m the first to admit that I am not the handiest handyman. However, maybe it’s a gender thing, but I love tools. All kinds of tools, gadgets, anything that will enable me to accidentally do more damage to my house while attempting to switch out a light fixture or thermostat or something else equally simple.

    As we all know, it’s important to have the right tools for the job, and in the interests of making sure you all have the right tools (as well as a jillion useful knicknacks that will come in handy on a regular basis), I’ve added a tool section to our Amazon Astore, replete with a coupla dozen near little doohickeys that you had no idea you needed – but now must have.

    So, should another equally disaster-prone handyman or handywoman in your home require that special holiday gift, look no further.

  • real estate listings: MLS to RSS

    Rssfeedgraphicbig
    So, obviously I’ve become a bit addicted to Yahoo Pipes. This free tool lets you aggregate, organize, and filter data from an unlimited number of RSS feeds and databases and present it in almost any kind of electronic form you can imagine.

    I’ve found a really good use for it, one which is – amazingly – missing from the vast majority of real estate listing sites. Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com and all the others: you are really letting the entire industry down by not having raw MLS data available as an RSS feed! I just could not believe that in an age when so many of us get our data on mobile devices and from feed readers that these firms wouldn’t have easily-configurable custom RSS feeds of their listings, but sure enough they don’t. Ziprealty is one of the very few to have such a useful feature, and more power to them for it.

    Using Ziprealty’s listings, house-for-sale posts on Craigslists in a dozen markets and a few other small sites here and there, I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that includes only listings self-described as "Craftsman," "Mission," "Prairie," or "bungalow." Now, if I can only figure out how to include photos of each property…

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/hewnandhammered/homesforsale

    If you are an agent, a broker or an MLS firm, please publish your data as a configurable / custom RSS feed. This way, searches that could take hours can be finished in just a minute or two, and users don’t need to revisit the sites every single day – using a service like feedburner or one of the many rss-to-email services, we can be notified only when our search criteria pop up in a market we are interested in, in our price range.

    And if you know of any listings services that do issue their data as an RSS feed, please share that info in the comments section below – I’d love to add them to the pipe. Also, let me know if you’d like me to include other cities’ Craigslist posts, I can do that pretty easily.

    If this tool is useful to you and if you think other folks might find it interesting, please digg it:


  • Stickley on Craigslist part 2 – and more

    I got over a dozen emails from those of you who found our Stickley-on-Craigslist aggregator (a page that lists all the Stickley items for sale in 15 major American cities’ Craigslists, filtered for those that include photographs), so I not only wanted to remind those of you who may be shopping for a major holiday gift for your Craftsman furniture loving spouse, but also to introduce something new…

    I’ve made variants of the same pipe for a few other search terms. Remember to bookmark this page, as these aggregators will always show the most recent entries for these terms, whether you check them today or next year:

    And remember, if you use Firefox or Safari (now available for Windows, too!) or another browser that lets you use live bookmarks, you can simply drag the rss feed right into your menu bar – or add it to your favorite newsreader or start page.

    Also, while I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes, I created a news aggregator – similar to Google News, but this one not only pulls in news stories, it also illustrates them with new and hopefully related photographs from Flickr:

  • this month’s ebay finds

    Plenty of interesting furniture, metalwork, glass & more on Ebay this month, with more than the usual number of small gift items available:

  • buy handmade this holiday season

    There are plenty of reasons to buy only handmade gifts this holiday season, chief among them that handmade objects have more soul & personality than even the finest machine-made mass-produced goods. Of course, there are also environmental and social reasons: money stays in the craftperson’s community, and doesn’t (as often) go into the coffers of WalTargetMartEtc. or another international conglomerate that cares not at all about its customers or the quality of the products it sells. From buyhandmade.com:

    Buying Handmade makes for better gift-giving.

    The
    giver of a handmade gift has avoided the parking lots and long lines of
    the big chain stores in favor of something more meaningful. If the
    giver has purchased the gift, s/he feels the satisfaction of supporting
    an artist or crafter directly. The recipient of the handmade gift
    receives something that is one-of-a-kind, and made with care and
    attention that can be seen and touched. It is the result of skill
    and craftsmanship that is absent in the world of large-scale
    manufacturing.

    Buying handmade is better for people.

    The
    ascendancy of chain store culture and global manufacturing has left us
    dressing, furnishing, and decorating alike. We are encouraged to be
    consumers, not producers, of our own culture. Our ties to the local and
    human sources of our goods have been lost. Buying handmade helps us
    reconnect.

    Buying handmade is better for the environment.

    The
    accumulating environmental effects of mass production are a major cause
    of global warming and the poisoning of our air, water and soil. Every
    item you make or purchase from a small-scale independent artist or
    crafter strikes a small blow to the forces of mass production.

    There are plenty of ways to do this. Visit one of the many hundreds of folks selling their wares on etsy.com, for instance, or your local artists’ guild, or contact a local community or technical college and find out who your neighborhood’s cabinetmakers and furniture carpenters are. Either way, down with plastic and up with real gifts!

  • Stickley says “relax”

    In the venn diagram of life, there is a small intersection between Frankie Goes to Hollywood Fans and aficionados of Craftsman design. This shirt is for those people – or, really, anyone who likes to sit in a comfy chair. Also, please let me know if you’d like to see it in other colors (the artwork, the text or the shirt) – I can indeed accommodate you. The shirts are quite affordable and are now available from my new Bountee store, and other designs are coming (and I’m always looking for suggestions, too).

  • Yahoo Pipes + Craigslist = SSS (simple Stickley searches) RSS

    Some of you may be familiar with RSS ("really simple syndication") – a way to publish "feeds" of regularly-changing information. Using Yahoo’s Pipes application, I’ve just made an RSS feed of Craigslist searches – in this case, 15 Craigslist city sites are searched for the term "Stickley," and those without images are filtered out. You may view the feed here – I hope it’s useful. In the future, I’ll build a full page of such searches, an Arts & Crafts furniture-for-sale aggregator for most American cities.