I live in a large condo complex in a rather nice town. People are constantly moving in and out and there is always free stuff for the taking if you look around. Sometimes people announce that they are moving and have to give most of their stuff away, other times, they just leave it out by one of the dumpsters to go to the first interested person.
Half the stuff I own came from the times I took the trash out and came back with a nice lamp or something. I once got a very nice table in perfect condition that my chinchilla cage still sits on. I thought I was doing well. That was until yesterday.
My daughters and I went for a walk. They are young enough that they like to blindly explore so we just wandered around. I let them take me to a part of the grounds that I don’t normally go to. There, sitting by the dumpster, was my chair. It is the massage chair that I always eyed in stores - a deep black and luxurious recliner in perfect condition at least superficially. My daughters looked at me and asked 'Can we keep it daddy?". My first instinct was to say no because we were hundreds of yards away from our place and this this is BIG and I didn’t even know if it had some fatal flaw.
Moving large furniture with two young girls as your partners requires a tutorial on its own but we are living proof that it can be done as long as you get your SUV involved. You can’t avoid all of the complaints and fake injuries to let them get out of it but they are stronger than they look when really pressed and yelled at. They are the ones that asked for it after all.
The chair is in the door now. It is time to plug it in and test it out. The lights on the remote flicker and then peter out after a few seconds. This would be a worst case scenario for any lesser person but I have never let anything that runs on electricity be anything less than my total bitch. Flip that chair over and look at all the wiring. It is relatively simple and well designed in modular components. 15 minutes of tracing the connections finds the flaw. It was a simple loose connection after all. The chair springs into action and starts to give massages.
These aren’t simple vibrating massages either. We are talking full upper and lower back kneeding, pulling and pounding combined with full recliner capability. It is like having a Vietnamese woman trapped in a piece of furniture. I love this thing and it is my greatest dumpster score yet. I don’t know if the person that threw it away is moving or just doesn’t know anything about basic electronics but it is all mine now.
I’d also be wary of possible bedbug infestation from anything (especially anything with upholstery) found in the trash at a multi-resident complex. Granted, in this case, it probably was dumped because of the wiring issue… I think I’d have been to paranoid to take it home to find that out in the first place.
It isn’t upholstery. It is 100% real leather and a very nice recliner even without any massage capability. I am an industrial electronics expert by trade. I am as qualified as anyone to to assess the safety of such systems. It really is a free but formerly very expensive massage chair in pristine condition. It doesn’t appear to have ever been used much at all. It just had that minor connection flaw. It is fairly large though. I have to guess that someone was moving and just couldn’t afford to move a piece of very heavy furniture that they viewed as glitchy.
What a great score! I have never found anything good by a dumpster, although I did once get a nice set of tiny stemmed glasses (perfect for sake) at a garage sale. Lady selling them couldn’t image what anyone would want with tiny “wineglasses.” Four for a quarter.
As a ute, I mowed the grass at an apartment complex a neighbor owned.
This car just sat there week after week, never moving, never driven it seems.
I finally asked the owner about it, and she told me it belonged to a tenant that skipped out on rent months ago. At the time, all you had to do to claim an abandoned vehicle was to post 3 public notices for a week, and bingo! Fill out this form and it’s yours.
So, for the cost of a tow home, and new keys made, I owned a very chic 1974 Fiat Sport Coupe!
Navy blue, DOHC, very fast, disc brakes, Blaupunkt stereo that boomed… totally awesome. Everything a 16yo needs!
We stopped one Sunday evening to have our supper on the road at a park in a rural South Carolina town. In the trash barrel was an entire pecan pie, lovingly home made by a Carolina lady which turned out to be surplus for some social pot-luck get-together at the park earlier in the day. It doesn’t get any better than that. I hope the person who made it did not know that it had been discarded so peremptorily, and if she did, I hope she reads this and knows how it was appreciated.
We never fail to check the trash cans at places where people picnic. Once in northern
Quebec (on a Labor Day, as it turns out), a brief shower had sent people scurrying home from their group outing. We got there an hour later to find the trash barrels richly laden with a dozen ears of unshucked corn, several steaks still in the cello-wrap, an unopened half gallon of milk, and a box of Tim Horton doughnut holes.
It’s a bonanza to go late in the day to a place where school kids have had an outing. The kids eat up all the twinkies and tetra boxes of sugary drinks and bags of salty chips, but throw away all the fresh fruit and good healthy sandwiches their mommies packed for them.
Several years ago, I saw two Hobart deli slicers on top of a dumpster parked in front of a sandwich shop that went out of business. The place was being gutted, so they were just in someone’s way. Sadly, I was on foot and several blocks from my destination, so lugging one or both of the 100+ pound machines was out of the question. A horrible pity, since those things sell for about $1500 each.
There’s a couple cars in the condo parking lot that have so much dirt on them I think you could unearth trilobite fossils if you scrap a bit. One is a nice Mercedes…
I furnished a whole apartment for me My daughter & My girlfriend one time out of dumpsters.
I did have mattresses & pillows already but was way short in the money department.
This complex catered to school kids, especially schools that cycled pretty fast & had completions once a month. There were many foreign students sent by parents of means & governments. The end of the month was like Christmas for some of us when I was there.
I still have a great lamp that I got that even had a working light bulb in it.
Never go a recliner as good as that one up thread but over the years, I have gotten a few recliners. I don’t need much anymore but I am always willing to peak inside if I have the time.
There are a few good things about a throw away society for guys like me.
I have seen a woman scorned throw away expensive items which were gifts, in a fit of rage, and then burn them.
More commonly, I have seen a few women scorned throw out their ex-lovers clothes, TV, stereo, dog, etc., out of a 3 story window.
I have to admit that that was somewhat more entertaining, especially with the poor dude down below pleading for forgiveness (it never works). And I was there because I was the guy with a van…
I’ve found a 3 seater couch once on someones naturestrip while walking home from work. Went home, got changed, came back, picked it up, balanced it on my head and shoulders and walked home with it.
Another time a colour TV. A mate who was into electronics fixed it for me for a beer.
Another time a park slide. One of those big metal jobs with the ladder and metal slide.
My son found a plasma TV recently that just needed the dust blown out of it.
