Dumpster Diving

In my previous post, I went into the pile of saved molding from elsewhere in the house.  I sorted through all of it to find the pieces I needed for the closet interiors.

As we have only the hallways and kitchen remaining, it's easier to see what we need to save and what we can dump.  We had a bunch of other construction debris along with other random bits of stuff collected by previous owners. They included radiators and doors, it was clear neither of which were ever installed in this house; they didn't match any that are still installed.

So we rented a 10 yard dumpster and filled it up last weekend.

At one point on Saturday as we were carrying stuff out and chucking it in the dumpster, several neighborhood folks paused to check on things or just chat.

Some called friends who came to turn our trash into their treasures, others offering advice about the few bucks we could get by recycling the cast iron from the radiators, others still about leaving things out of the dumpster so the metal recyclers could get to it.

Here are my thoughts:

1. If it's in the dumpster and you want it, be my guest.
2. The going rate for scrap iron is $100 per long ton.  So if you want to haul 600 pounds of radiators to the scrap yard so you can get $25 bucks, you know where to find it.
3. I'm only touching this stuff once. I'm hauling it out of the basement and throwing it in the dumpster, not putting it on the boulevard to see if someone takes it and then later putting it in the dumpster.  See #1.

By the time we called the company to pickup the dumpster a couple days later, some of the stuff had been turned into treasures...