Curating Craigslist

Craigslist can be a bounty of cheap booty if you're willing to put in the time sifting through all the listings. But too much sifting and a certain depression sets in: For every bona fide find, there's loads more sad, soggy-looking couches, never-used wedding dresses, and the dispiriting detritus of newly dismantled lives.

Enter Thou Shall Craigslist (www.thoushallcraigslist.blogspot.com), an Austin-specific blog that does the weeding out for you to present a finely curated sampling of the best the site has to offer: a vintage cedar chest, an Eames-style armchair, a Norman Rockwell reprint you swear you saw in your grandparents' foyer decades ago.

The site was started this fall by a local English as a second language teacher named Maxine (she prefers her last name not be broadcast to the masses). She swears she's not some Craigslist obsessive. "Oh goodness, I hope not," she laughs. The blog's origins were much simpler – Maxine just wanted to start a new project. "I recently turned 30. Every time I have a birthday, I do something new," she explains. "It's almost like a New Year's resolution. Sometimes I quit something. Really I'm just looking for a change."

Change, that universal impulse. Personally, I'm thinking a Norman Rockwell reprint would really turn my foyer around.