On Craigslist & Chest freezers

Craigslist has been good to us. The Indianapolis listings aren't as active as some major cities, but they're not as bad as others. Indianapolis isn't a huge city, so many of the areas people are posting from are accessible- and, depending on the item, we're willing to make the drive.

Some of our experience with Craigslist so far:

• Bought yarn when I was starting my knitting hobby, to build up a "stash"
• Sold 2 laptops
• Sold a bookshelf
• Got, for free, a member of our family
• ** EDIT (I had forgotten about this one) ** My husband found a job on the job postings earlier this year
  
• Bought a 9 cubic foot chest freezer used for $50 (retails new for $250-$350)
  
• Bought an invisible fence new for $75 (retails for $150+, or more than $1000 with installation)

The last two have happened in the last week, and I'm super-excited about. We'll have to install the fence ourself, and I'm not 100% sure it will work for Casey, but it's worth a try. We'd really like to give him the run of our whole (large) yard and I hate chaining him up.

The chest freezer is something I've been wanting for a long time. My freezer is always full- I freeze leftovers, preserve produce, cook more than we need & freeze for future meals, and frozen things are easier to portion out & keep for our small family. We just don't eat through stuff in the fridge before it goes bad, much of the time.

So now we have a chest freezer! A huge chest freezer! What to do with it?

• Cookie sheets will now fit in my freezer. Many make-ahead recipes (ok, I'll admit, cookies, among others) say to freeze the items on a cookie sheet before putting them in a freezer bag for storage so they don't stick together. I'd NEVER be able to get a cookie sheet in my side-by-side freezer, and was never able to with my typical freezer-on-the-top freezer either, because it was always full.
• Once-a-week/month cooking, making larger batches & storing them for later lazy nights when I don't feel like cooking, will now be possible. I had a busy evening this week and was particularly grateful I had cooked ground beef and beans ahead- I plopped those and 3 cans of diced tomatoes and some spices in a pot - voila! chili! (...that I've been eating on all week for lunch.) These extra meals can also be given to people in crisis or to new parents as unique baby gifts, to ease the trasition to life with a newborn.
• Preserving produce was fast filling my freezer. Now I have lots of room for frozen beans & peas!
• Sale prices can now be taken advantage of! When hamburger buns are on sale at Meijer Buy 1, Get 2 Free- I don't have to think "When will we eat through 3 bags of hamburger buns?" Into the freezer they go!
• Room for "freezer pack" meat. Many of my friends have bought a half side of beef for their chest freezers- that's one-quarter of a cow- which comes out to about 100 lbs. The primary advantage we see in doing this is knowing where our meat came from- we would buy the meat from the farmer, so we would be able to choose grass-fed organic beef from a farmer who treats his animals well. We'll end up with healthier meat from happier animals- and a variety of cuts, at that! The same goes for storing whole chickens- we'll be able to buy more than one at a time. This point was the biggest motivation for getting a freezer for us.
• Ice cream. There, I admitted it. We actually will have room for my favorite food now.
  

For those of you with chest freezers, how has it worked for you? What do you store in yours? Also, anyone have once a month cooking ideas?