TLDR: Wood buy from Belinda again
I was on the hunt for a very large piece of driftwood for my 120p. I knew I wanted something that would have branches that stuck out of the water. Everything local to me, including Aquarium Co-Op, was on the smaller side (the piece in my 75p was about the biggest they had). I didn't want to combine pieces and was really looking for a singular piece of large driftwood. I had seen some local posts on marketplace with larger pieces, but nothing really caught my attention.
@JayP had made a post about Belinda's Driftwood on Facebook and I started casually browsing her posts until I saw a piece that really spoke to me.
Belinda responded to my DMs surprisingly quick, including some back and forth to figure out if it would fit in the tank. She estimated shipping would be $100 and asked if she should remove the longer branches to save on shipping, estimating it would save roughly $30, which I declined. I started messaging her on a Wednesday morning and had tracking Friday afternoon. All in, $160 for the wood + $113* for shipping = $273. For comparison, I spent $40 on the wood for my 75p, which is a fraction of the size. While $113 for shipping seems high, it seemed reasonable to me given the size (oversized shipping) and recent USPS temporary increases due to oil prices. Not to mention, Belinda didn't charge anything for packaging, which there was no shortage of. USPS took about 2 weeks to get the wood to me, but thanks to the packaging, it arrived undamaged!
*This was shipped with retail pricing and Belinda is now using PirateShip (based on FB posts), so I'd expect shipping costs to be lower given the commercial pricing via PirateShip.
Without further ado, this thread is worthless without pics
Here's the initial screenshot she sent me since I had messaged before the piece was posted. She essentially does a photo dump of pieces that she's posting soon and I messaged her that I was interested in one.
As delivered by USPS. This thing was packaged like a tank!
Humans for scale
Unwrapping the packaging
Each individual branch was padded with support and had cardboard on it. The carboard in the top right corner of this picture was shockingly thick.
45 minutes later, I had it free
In the tank (It's almost a perfect fit as is!)
Soaking (now).
I was on the hunt for a very large piece of driftwood for my 120p. I knew I wanted something that would have branches that stuck out of the water. Everything local to me, including Aquarium Co-Op, was on the smaller side (the piece in my 75p was about the biggest they had). I didn't want to combine pieces and was really looking for a singular piece of large driftwood. I had seen some local posts on marketplace with larger pieces, but nothing really caught my attention.
@JayP had made a post about Belinda's Driftwood on Facebook and I started casually browsing her posts until I saw a piece that really spoke to me.
Belinda responded to my DMs surprisingly quick, including some back and forth to figure out if it would fit in the tank. She estimated shipping would be $100 and asked if she should remove the longer branches to save on shipping, estimating it would save roughly $30, which I declined. I started messaging her on a Wednesday morning and had tracking Friday afternoon. All in, $160 for the wood + $113* for shipping = $273. For comparison, I spent $40 on the wood for my 75p, which is a fraction of the size. While $113 for shipping seems high, it seemed reasonable to me given the size (oversized shipping) and recent USPS temporary increases due to oil prices. Not to mention, Belinda didn't charge anything for packaging, which there was no shortage of. USPS took about 2 weeks to get the wood to me, but thanks to the packaging, it arrived undamaged!
*This was shipped with retail pricing and Belinda is now using PirateShip (based on FB posts), so I'd expect shipping costs to be lower given the commercial pricing via PirateShip.
Without further ado, this thread is worthless without pics
Here's the initial screenshot she sent me since I had messaged before the piece was posted. She essentially does a photo dump of pieces that she's posting soon and I messaged her that I was interested in one.
As delivered by USPS. This thing was packaged like a tank!
Humans for scale
Unwrapping the packaging
Each individual branch was padded with support and had cardboard on it. The carboard in the top right corner of this picture was shockingly thick.
45 minutes later, I had it free
In the tank (It's almost a perfect fit as is!)
Soaking (now).
And the amount of time it takes to unwrap her packaging is no joke.
