My husband makes great pizza. One of the gifts I wanted to give him this year was a pizza stone. But since I’m on The Compact, my task was to find one used. I was a little skeptical that I would succeed. I wasn’t going to buy one new if I couldn’t find one, I was just going to skip it because I’ve got other gifts for him.
All my gifts this year are handmade, used, or experiential. It’s been fun and I’m already almost done except for the baking and wrapping.
My steps for finding a used pizza stone, as is the Compact-y way, went as follows:
1) Tell people I’m looking out for the item. I sent out an email in case anyone had one they weren’t using. I got one response that I could use a paver from Home Depot instead of a pizza stone. I considered that but couldn’t find a suitable paver, they were all too thick.
2) Went to two Goodwills. There weren’t any pizza stones, but I asked a manager if they ever get them. I’ve seen tons of breadmakers at Goodwill. One manager didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, the other said he’d seen them occasionally, once even new and still in the box. I made one more visit to that Goodwill, so three visits total.
3) I put up a notice on Freecycle that I was looking for a pizza stone.
After a couple of weeks, I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that I wouldn’t be giving my husband a pizza stone. But because I had “put the word out,” an awesome friend sent me a link to a pizza stone he saw listed on Craigslist. So I bought it! The woman selling it was asking $10 for the stone and $8 for the paddle. She told me she loved it but she was going vegan so she thought it best to get rid of it.
It’s a little stained, but my friend told me it doesn’t matter because a new one would get stained right away anyway. I was very happy with the gift, but since it was used I couldn’t get too excited about wrapping it up and went ahead and gave it to my husband early. He can’t wait to make pizza next week.
Moral of the story: “Ask and ye shall receive.” Or maybe “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Or maybe “good things come to those who wait.” You get the picture. It was a combination of patience, putting the word out, and Craigslist that scored this pizza stone.
It IS possible to get through the holidays on The Compact! It’s been fun in fact. I wrote about Compact-y holiday gifts a few weeks back. If you missed it, click here to read the post about experiential gifts and here to get ideas for handmade gifts.
Do you ever use freecycle, Craigslist or ebay? What about for gifts? Tell us about your favorite gift scores in the Comments section.
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