The Steamboat Pilot & Today

High costs yield free furniture

It’s mud season. And for the fourth time in 12 months, I’m moving everything I own to a new place.

I start out packing up a car, realize none of my used furniture is worth toting, throw clothes, cooking pans and pieces of home into big plastic laundry bags and drive across a town — or a country — and unpack with the full expectation of doing it all again before everything is out of its handed-down cardboard box.

It’s an exhausting cycle.

But between four years in college (11 moves) and a year in Steamboat (three moves), I’ve come to look at the month of May as a sort of second holiday season.

When you’re semi-transient, you’re not necessarily looking for new, or nice, things. And that makes yard sales, garage sales, liquidation sales — or any opportunity to mooch off of people with permanence — a veritable gold mine of cutthroat prices on home furnishings and accessories no one else wants.

In Steamboat Springs, there are easily as many opportunities for this as there were in my college town — a formidable accomplishment for a place with a recorded population about one-fifth the size.

Between hotels and businesses being forced to get rid of everything before the wrecking ball hits, restaurants trying to keep up appearances for another season of tourists and residents who leave town when the mountain closes, there are plenty of opportunities to furnish a living room or redo a sports equipment wardrobe.

I’ve yet to buy a piece of furniture since moving here (unless a portable clothing rack counts), and have lived in three fully furnished apartments. It’s not a bad deal, and it certainly cuts the costs of making a ski town home — costs that, on closer inspection, are the reason behind living in three apartments in eight months.

At some point, I’m sure my excitement over heavily used free furniture will fade. But for now, I’m disappointed in myself for having slept through the Hayden community yard sale Saturday, and I plan to make a second trip to the eerily picked-over Thunderhead Lodge in the next few days.

A skyrocketing cost of living doesn’t have many perks.

But a free coffee table makes that cost a little more bearable.

— Margaret Hair, 4 Points