• more library card catalogs & other storage – craigslist

    Filecabinets

    I know people love these things. I do too … I just don’t have anywhere to fit more furniture in my house, especially not with the step tansu that I’d like to wedge into the living room somehow. Here are several I’ve found this week on Craigslists around the country:

    west coast

    midwest

    east coast

    • petite tabletop 6-drawer card file in Ithaca NY: $50enormous, ex-built-in 19th-century dark wood
    • 72-drawer library card file near Boston MA: $1200
    • 14-drawer library card file (5×8 cards) with two missing drawers in Browns Mills NJ: $45

    south & southwest

    • tabletop 2-drawer Remington Rand oak card file in Crawfordville FL: $80
    • wood and plastic 60-drawer & 3-shelf library card file in Jacksonville FL: $650
    • two large four-drawer wooden file cabinets from Library Bureau SoleMalers, early 20th century, near Orlando FL: $335 each
    • 15-drawer, 2-shelf tabletop library card file, includes table, near San Antonio TX: $200

  • for sale: restored Knoxville shingle bungalow, $289,000

    Knoxville is a great town with some really terrific old neighborhoods, and for the most part, citizens who delight in historic preservation and are trying consistently to keep chains, strip-malls, big boxes and other detritus out of historic districts full of pretty old homes.

    Knox Heritage is the most active of the city-wide architecture rejuvenation and conservation development companies, regularly buying old properties and cleaning them up for resale as part of their Vintage Homes Program. They also regularly offer neighborhood tours, raise money to preserve endangered properties and keep track of threatened structures throughout the region.

    Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s alt weekly, recently ran a note & listing for one such home that has to change hands due to an unfortunate job relocation – the owner, Amy Quimby (who knows old homes – she’s an executive at Home & Garden Television) – is very sad to leave it, but she’s got to move on to Denver.

    The 2650 sq ft, 4 bed, 2.5 bath home – at 321 E. Oklahoma in Knoxville – is going for $289,000, and it’s gorgeous inside and out.

  • 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):

  • 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:

  • 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.

  • Ebay roundup, October 2007, part 1

    This month, there are more knicknacks than you can shake even the fanciest stick at over on the mother of all online auction sites. The following aren’t necessarily excellent deals, but everything here is at least interesting.

    As usual, I’m avoiding everything labeled misleadingly (i.e., "Roycroft era," "Stickley style," "maybe Stickley?," etc. … I’ll have plenty more up next week and the week after.