By Jim Cavan

Like a lot of people around the Seacoast and around the country, Gavin Barbour is looking for a deal. No, he’s not clipping coupons from the Sunday paper or caffeinating for a weekend mall sale. Rather Barbour, a builder and carpenter based in Kittery, is gathering up boxes of bathroom tiles, long dormant in his family’s basement, to sell online. The only question now is, where to sell them? Lucky for Barbour, a new classifieds website launched just last month may provide the answer.

DiggersList, a national site launched a little over a year ago, recently went live and local with the launching of a New Hampshire DiggersList, along the way offering Seacoast residents and businesses a chance to buy or sell quality building materials -- new and recycled alike.

For Barbour, who already plans to utilize DiggersList for his family‘s ever-growing list of renovations and projects, the opportunity to give the good-as-new tiles a second life was just as appealing as the prospects of making a few extra bucks. “It just seemed like a great move all around and for everybody, in that you’re getting rid of stuff collecting dust in your basement, while making a few bucks and keeping stuff out of a landfill at the same time.”

A California-based website launched last summer, DiggersList specializes in building materials, supplies, and services – all at cut rate cost, and all tailored to specific regions and cities. The website, which had already housed individual sites for over a dozen cities across the country, recently made New Hampshire DiggersList their latest addition. Partnering with Dover’s Habitat for Humanity ReStore and other businesses in the Green Alliance, a local green business union and discount member co-op, NH DiggersList had for months been building up an impressive stockpile of materials, including much of Re-Store’s massive inventory.

Aside from the familiar sounding name, the site looks and works much like craigslist; the home page is broken down into states, with cities and towns listed below. Once you select 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, and all of it search engine-ready. Clicking on a specific item brings you to a page replete with pictures, information, an email form to contact the seller, as well as a list of other, similar items that might be more like what the shopper is looking for. Facebook and Twitter links allow users to post interesting services or items to their respective pages, lending even more eyes to DiggersLists’s unique and dynamic inventory.

The brainchild of California native and part-time surfer Matt Knox, DiggersList has, in less than a year, gone from an insular, local showcase to a nationally recognized and utilized resource. After years working as an insurance broker for contractors in Southern California, founder Matt Knox realized there really wasn’t an online outlet for excess materials and supplies from job sites. Still, he knew he didn‘t want his site to be just another Craiglist, and instead looked for ways to make DiggersList more inviting, more user friendly, and easier to navigate.

“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 someone looking to get rid of an old wheelbarrow or a small business looking for another avenue to your customer.

Tom Boisvert definitely fits into the latter category. As Operations Manager at the Dover ReStore, Boisvert was the first to seize on DiggersList’s enormous potential, and as such is more than excited about the partnership and what it could do for the local economy. “This is a great way to increase our exposure, as well as the exposure of Diggerslist and other businesses in the area,” says Boisvert. “We feel by starting off with an extensive list of materials, we’ve helped Digger’s list get off to a good start here on the Seacoast.”

Boisvert should know; Re-Store’s massive inventory is already heavily featured on the New Hampshire Diggerslist, and the hope going forward is that other Seacoast businesses and contractors will follow suit. But for as much as the site is tailored to and encouraging of individuals who, like Gavin Barbour, simply want an outlet for their quality clutter, it can also serve as a way for local businesses to draw in new customers to their actual stores.

For all the similarities to its half namesake, the site includes a number of features which set it apart from craigslist, including promotional videos, a full-time blog and Facebook-style wall-post function, 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 Green Alliance – are slated to be featured on the New Hampshire DiggersList site.

The result, according to GA Director Sarah Brown, is a New Hampshire DiggersList that is profoundly green. “When you think about how much is going to be available and how close it will all be, it’s really remarkable,” says Brown. “Short of spending your money at a big box store, it’s hard to imagine a more convenient source for building supplies and materials – and you can feel a lot better about it knowing it’s recycled!”

No one, least of all the irreversibly optimistic Brown, is under the delusion that DiggersList will somehow save our local economy. But what everyone -- from individuals like Barbour to businesses like Boisvert’s to Matt Knox himself -- can certainly agree on is that DiggersList represents a decidedly 21st century phenomenon: the influence, reach and inherent openness of the internet running headlong into the equally fervent reorientation towards community; in short, the convergence of the global and the local, highlighted in full by an overarching emphasis on good old-fashioned conservation.

“When I initially reached out to Matt Knox, he called me back literally that day,” says Brown. “And the first thing they explained was how, with a lot of other sites, they really hit a wall in terms of local interest, because there wasn’t the kind of locally-oriented infrastructure we’ve built here on the Seacoast. Now that they’ve seen how successful that kind of model can be, they want to use the New Hampshire model going forward, and I think that’s something we can both be proud of and continue to try and build upon.“

Luckily for the Seacoast, if there’s anything the people of DiggersList know how to do -- be they contractors or builders or one-time spring cleaners -- it’s building things.

The New Hampshire DiggersList already has a burgeoning inventory of products, services, contractors, and businesses including ReStore (Dover), Ultra Geothermal (Barrington), SEA Solar Store (Dover), Ridgeview Construction (Deerfield), Scarponi Electric (Rochester), ZESstudio (Lee), as well as the GA itself, with products range from countertops and windows to refrigerators and hot tubs.