I love teh interwebs.
We bought a washing machine new in 2003 after we bought the house, passing our tiny "portable" one on to a friend who didn't have one. My FIL found a free dryer on the side of the road (also when we bought the house), and we've been using them both for the last 14 years.
For the last few years the dryer would randomly not dry a load, and a month or so ago it developed a horrible banging noise. On Saturday I opened the back to take a look at it, and decided it was beyond me, so on to Craigslist. The $100 dryer I found was going to be an hour long drive tonight after work, then maybe an hour and a half home. I told my wife and she told me that the washer was going, too- it had been unhappy about draining and was getting worse. So I jumped back on my computer and found a set for $150 a little over an hour from home and Sunday morning was good for him.
The trip went well: both were installed, tested and running by 2:00 and I got the old hulks into the metal dumpster at the dump. Over dinner I explained to the kids that back in my day, we would have had to dig the last week's newspapers out of the recycling tote and read through a week's worth of classifieds to see if anyone in the area had paid to put in an ad that they were selling a dryer (and then gone back through looking for a set). And we'd have come up dry because the ones we found were in different areas that have different newspapers.
So laundry's good. 14 years ago we bought a new washer and got a free dryer. Total around $400. This year we paid $150 to replace the pair. Sure, I could have tried to see what I could do to fix the washer, but by paying the extra $50 (as I saw it) not only replaced the washer, but did it on Sunday when I was better able to do the run.
I don't do Cragslist often, maybe just once or twice a year, but every deal I've done has been a solid win.