When you’re looking for cheap stuff, it pays to do more than browse the sales ads. For example, I have been wanting a barbeque for most of the summer. It’s fun to invite friends over for an inexpensive and cool summer entertainment. It’s nice to cook outside on hot days instead of heating up the kitchen. Also, pretty much anything you toss on a barbeque tastes better (probably because all of those carcinogenic chemicals produced in the burning process, but that’s another story). So, stomach cancer concerns aside’¦ I want a barbeque and recently began the process of purchasing one.

Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, barbeques became very expensive. The ones in the stores include $1500 stainless steel monstrosities that are bigger than my indoor stove with side burners, miles of cooking surface and sometimes their own fridges and sinks installed underneath. They’re not just barbeques, they’re ‘˜outdoor cooking centres.’

Well, okay, but I just want to grill some stuff.

I tried craigslist and kijiji first. The upside is that these listings offer a nice, wide range of options. The $1500 models are available there, often for about a third off the original price. There’s also tiny electric and charcoal models, mid-range models of unknown usage and more. My main problem was trying to hook up with an owner of a model I wanted, for a price I wanted, who didn’t live at the other end of the city and was only available at odd hours for pickup.

So, while waiting for something to come up on this front, I went online to browse the sales flyers from the local hardware stores. The first thing to learn about August is that summer grilling equipment goes on a huge, end-of-season sale. There were several mid-price to high-end models that were half price or better, which kind of knocked the socks of some of the used models on sale are more modest reductions and with more limited pickup access. I narrowed my selection down to a couple of models under $400 (about half off the original price) when I remembered the frugalist’s first and last resort – my friends. Borrowing is a great way to reduce long-term clutter in my own house, and sharing unwanted items with friends is a great way to freecycle things instead of throwing them out. There are freecycle communities, by the way, that have formalized this process among strangers who live in a given city or area, and I encourage frugalists to join these lists and enjoy the constant stream of items that are useless to someone else but might be useful to you.

It’s also worthwhile to just ask your friends. Even if someone hasn’t asked you if you want a spare barbeque, it’s worth putting a generalized request out there and see if something comes up. People aren’t necessarily going to remember to mention it, so it’s good to make the effort to jog their mental inventories. For me, it only took one phone call to locate a friend of mine who had recently moved and had no room for her barbeque in her new apartment. With some quick schedule juggling, I was in my minivan (I knew this beast would come in useful for something!) and across town to pickup her old barbeque in exchange for helping her harvest her old garden.

We walked in through the back yard and up to the deck where the barbeque was stored, and had an awkward moment with the new tenants who apparently hadn’t been informed by the property manager that the barbeque didn’t come with the apartment and was going to be picked up by its original owner, which was my friend, really, no honest… (that’s where the stealing part of this post comes into effect because they really had no way to know we were telling the truth). We managed to work it out with them and carried it down the back stairs into my waiting van, not feeling too much like looters and trying not to look suspicious. I had put down a blanket in the back of the van for these occasions, which was a good thing because it only fit in sideways and spilled some charcoal and rust out the side of the pan. Minutes later, I’m back at home with my newly acquired barbeque installed in my back yard. My first meal will be to invite my friend over to enjoy dinner with us, in thanks for her generosity for her gift.

So in the end I have a smaller model barbeque, which is perfect for my small backyard, it works and best of all, it was free. That it came with a bonus serving of mint, basil and swiss chard was an unexpected bonus.