Looking for a Dog Cage/crate for New Puppy

I love craigslist, and I found this low price notification system (it's like $10) called adnotifier... well worth the money, considering it never runs out and everything I've ever been looking for to purchase, I ended up finding for free since they notify you of stuff first! I forget the website but it's called adnotifier :)

We crate trained from the puppy stage and I agree with Victoria. To the dog, it should fee like a den. Our dogs never wanted to be out of the crates once they were trained that way. They go in them when we leave the house and come out as soon as we get home. I have tried putting them in a bigger confined area like a large cage would be to your dog, and they hated it. Chewed and peed and pooped and scratched and apparently barked the entire time. Back in the little crate they went and they were perfectly happy. I would wait until you see your dog's temperment before buying a bigger cage and just keep her in the carrier for now. Ours are the size that they would use on an airplane, so just carriers basically, and that is how they like them. We used ours to do potty training and so we got the little ones that they could turn around in and that is it. When your puppy is fully potty trained and out of the chewing stage is when it would be time to see if it would like a larger caged area. Just another idea to consider.

I'm not sure exactly how small of a carrier you have her in, but keep in mind that when you are crate training your dog/puppy, you want it to be a little small. You don't want the pup to be able to pee/poop in one end of the crate and then go to the other end to lay down. They do not want to lie down in their own excrement, that is why crate training works in the first place. (But you can't expect them to LIVE in the crate 23 hours a day, either). Even for big dogs, you start out with small crates.. so they can't go too far away if they use the bathroom in it... that encourages them to wait until you take them out to the appropriate place to go to the bathroom. As a puppy, they obviously have to be taken out frequently.
Any Petsmart or Walmart will have crates that will work and they are not that expensive. Even a LARGE one (for a German Shepherd over 60 lbs) only costs around $50 or $60... the smaller ones much much less.

We have 2 dogs, one is 100lbs and the other is about 75lbs (both are big puppies- really!) And we used to put them in crates when we left the house. The #1 thing you want to make sure is that the crate is big enough for the dog to turn completely in a circle and stand w/ about 6 inches of space above its head. You don't want her to feel "caged in." And remember all dogs are different, example, my dogs would lay down and chill out until we got home. My sister has a doberman and he would poo all over his kennel and roll in it EVERY time they'd leave. Turns out, he just didn't want to be in the kennel! :-)
I don't know about IL, but I live in northern MI and we have farm type stores, like Tractor Supply Co., and they have a variety of kennels and crates. That is where we got ours.
Good luck!

Try Craigslist or Freecycle.com