Written by, Jim Cavan, Green Alliance

Since its inception nearly 15 years ago, craigslist has helped countless millions worldwide find everything from picnic tables to jobs to relationships. But anyone who’s gone on the massive classifieds site looking for moldings, painting supplies, or used lumber, may have found themselves trolling around longer than it would have taken to drive to the nearest Home Depot and back. 

Enter the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which specializes in recycled and re-used construction, building, and home improvement materials. Partnering with California-based Diggerslist and Green Alliance (GA), a Seacoast-based green business union, starting in February the ReStore will be posting large swaths of its inventory of used building and home improvement supplies on the growing “construction classifieds” site.

Aside from the familiar sounding name, the site looks and works much like craigslist: the main page is broken down into states, with cities and towns listed below. Once you click on a city, you get a lengthy list of projects, services, and materials – everything from fill dirt to fireplaces, cabinets to carpet, patios to paints and pools.

The goal for the GA and ReStore is to help the New Hampshire Seacoast get its own regional site on Diggerslist. Along with other GA Business Partners, Re-Store will be cataloguing a large bulk of its entire inventory in the hopes that others in the area follow suit. Once the site is bulked up, Knox will launch the Seacoast Diggerslist site –hopefully by the middle of February – to coincide with the launch of Dover ReStore’s new and improved website around the same time.

According to Tom Boisvert, Manager at ReStore, the hope is to launch the Seacoast Diggerslist with a fully formed list of a majority of ReStore’s inventory. “This is a great way to increase our exposure, as well as the exposure of Diggerslist,” says Boisvert. “We feel by starting off with an extensive list of materials, we’ll help Digger’s list get off to a good start here on the Seacoast.”

After years working as an insurance broker for contractors in Southern California, Diggerslist founder Matt Knox realized there really wasn’t an online outlet for excess materials and supplies from job sites. “When we started parsing out how we were going to do this, we realized craigslist wasn’t specific enough for what we wanted to do,” explains Knox. “Now that we’ve gone from a national site back to one focused more on communities and individual cities, it’s been really encouraging.”

The best part? It’s all free – free to join, free to use, and free to list, whether you’re a small business looking for another avenue to your customer or just someone who’s looking to get rid of an old wheelbarrow.

The site includes a number of features which set it apart from craigslist, including promotional videos, a full-time blog, photo albums, a job listing where builders can bid on contracts and projects, and a “builder’s forum” where those in the industry can post their profiles and contact information. Thus far a number of local builders, contractors, and companies – including many represented in the GA – are slated to be featured on the Seacoast Diggerslist site.

GA Director Sarah Brown sees Diggerslist as a perfect outlet for people looking to renovate and re-invent their homes and businesses in a struggling economy. “We’re really excited about using our resources here at the GA to help bring Diggerslist to the Seacoast,” says Brown. “When we found out about what Matt and his brother had done with the site, we recognized it immediately as a perfect opportunity to get many of our 80 Business Partners involved to make it a go-to source for building and remodeling materials.”

For more information about Diggerslist, check out their website at www.diggerslist.com
For learn more about Dover’s Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, visit their website at www.senhhabitat.org/restore
For more information about the Green Alliance, visit www.greenalliance.biz