The all-nighter pt. 2

garbagefinds16 Comments

Sorry for another long delayed post. I spent a lot of January and February distracted by a video game I got for Christmas. I’ve worked pretty hard over the last decade or so, with no real vacation, and this was about as close to one as I’m going to get as long as I’m dealing with this.

I’m now 37 (as of today, happy birthday to me!). I think I’m at the point where I’m willing to punt those months on a regular basis. Hunting for interesting piles isn’t as fun when it’s super cold out, and it’s not usually as productive either. And it’s not like I have a shortage of junk!

More recently, there has been another deluge of trash that has kept me very busy. When I load my van almost to the brim with junk, it’s a good days work just to sort it all out, let alone do anything with it. Honestly, I don’t really know how I managed to devote time to taking nice group photos like I used to. Maybe there was just less trash then, maybe I’m just a better picker now, or maybe I’m just less willing or able to work myself to ruination than I used to be. Most likely, a combination of two and three.

The reality is that the old ways don’t really work anymore. I need to change my operations somehow. I may need a bigger space, maybe even a part time employee. There is just too much stuff for one person to effectively deal with, let alone give these items the attention they deserve (ie: my nice photos from the past).

Anyways, for now we’re going to time warp back to last August, when I pulled my first ever all-nighter digging through trash. This is how things looked when I quit at around 6:33am.

This was a memorable pile for a variety of reasons. For one, my first all-nighter due to sheer size (and also difficulty – a lot of stuff was in the dumpsters, so I had to actually do some diving for a change). This was something close to an entire apartment on the curb. I spent about 8 hours just scrounging, and honestly those hours are very taxing. Even a couple hours of intensive picking can be exhausting, so I had to dig deep to make it through eight.

For two, at one point someone else comes out of the building and starts picking, and as it turns out they were familiar with my blog, although not a regular follower. We talked a fair bit. He was obsessed with finding stashes of cash, and was laser focused on looking through the many envelopes in hopes of finding some bills. I found this very specific fixation kind of hilarious. I find cash sometimes, most notably in 2018 when I found four separate cash stashes (plus a bunch of unused gift cards) in what was an outlier year, but otherwise cash finds are pretty rare and I never really think about them. They happen when they happen, and you don’t make them happen by thinking about them more.

We agreed to split any cash hauls. But he left as the clock approached 2am, like a somewhat normal person, and I stayed picking until the sun came up like an insane (let’s go with “devoted”) person.

Then at around 5:03am, after around 7 hours of digging, I was looking through some linens when this wad popped out from inside some sheets. The top bill was a hundred, which got me really excited.

(That was exact time within a minute or so by the way. I always try to take a time-stamped picture of my good finds in situ, for blog purposes but also as evidence in case someone wants to claim that I’m actually a cat burglar and not a trash picker).

It was the only 100$ unfortunately, but who’s complaining? The bills were all dated from the mid 1970s, and the grand total was 534$, which made it my best cash haul of my trash picking career (beating out the 307 USD haul from a few years back by over 100$ once converted). Many are crisp and barely used, so they are likely worth above face value to a collector.

Then at 5:39am, I opened up a document box and spotted a watch. It was a Rolex, and I think it’s real.

The next day, I had a thought. The garbage was likely picked up, but maybe not the recycling – that’s a different day in this neighbourhood. The recycling bins were full of junk too, and I hadn’t had time to look through them. So I went back the next day, and the recycling was indeed still there – as well as the same guy who was picking the day before. I told him about the cash, which I probably shouldn’t have because it made him more excited about picking (and motivating other people to try harder doesn’t help me make money).

Anyways, at one point we were talking, and he casually pulls this old blazer out of a recycling bin without paying much attention. I noticed something go flying out of one of the pockets, and picked it up quietly. It’s another Rolex.

Later that night, I was digging deep into these recycling bins and found a random 50$ bill and a Tag Heuer at the bottom of one of them. If I recall correctly, the pocket watch was in the same box as the Rolex.

Unfortunately, neither Rolex works, but if they’re real they are still worth decent money regardless. Probably several hundred to low 1000s. I don’t have the tool required to take the back off, which would definitely help confirm, but the details look pretty good under the jewelers loop. If you know much about watches, let me know what you think! Either way, even if they’re fake, I still have the 584$, and the roughly two van loads of stuff (some of which is very cool and valuable) that I saved here.

I couldn’t finish even the recycling bins that 2nd night, so I went back a third night and found even more stuff. All in all, I put in around 16 hours picking there. A lot of it went to the yard sales, or Instagram, or eBay, but over half a year later, and I still have a box or two of this stuff at my garage. Things that I want to research more, or things I’d want to take pictures of, if I ever had the time. Alas, even the wad of cash and the Rolexes have been collecting dust since then.

One of my mottos is “there’s always more garbage.” It’s a statement of fact, and an explanation for why one specific find rarely keeps my attention for any length of time. It’s why it’s hard if not impossible to buy things from me, because by the time I post a picture of something here or on Instagram, I’ve already kind of moved on. I do this out of necessity. Not even a week after my all-nighter, and the subsequent part-nighters in the recycling bins, I filled my car with another load of junk, from a totally different neighbourhood, including this awesome dog lamp that somehow survived 60-some years and a trip to the curb. And the cycle continued.

Too much garbage is a good problem to have, at least from the point of view of my self-interest. But I do need to figure out a new way to do things, because the old ways are simply no longer sustainable with this kind of inflow.

Anyways, let’s hope it’s not another three months or so before I get the itch to post again!

Links

1. My eBay listings. Sign up for eBay (Canada, US). Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US). — These are Ebay Partner Network links. If you create an account or buy something after getting to eBay from here, I get a small cut of the profit!  —
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells. Note that someone else runs the latter.
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Donate to the blog. It costs close to 500$ a year to maintain (no ads, domain name, storage space, etc) which ain’t cheap. Otherwise, it’s nice to get a few bucks for coffee, food, or gas! –Widget still unavailable–

Rien n’est beau que le vrai

garbagefinds5 Comments

I’ll finish the organizational post another time. This post I’d like to dedicate to Nick Huston, a friend who passed away recently after a fire. We were closest between 5-10 years ago, but I hadn’t seen him in a while, largely because I’m bad at staying in touch (for a variety of reasons). On November 23rd he messaged me about wanting to look through my trash hoard. We chatted a bit, but didn’t make plans, and on December 15th he was gone. He was an unpretentious, goofy, generous guy, and was taken from the world far too soon. He wanted to see my garbage, so here it is bud. This junk’s for you.

This was one of a few intriguing spots I had on rue St-Denis this year. These guys rarely threw out much at once, but there was enough to keep me checking back week after week. My best day was when I opened a bag that was mostly full of food (both wet and dry, so kind of gross), but also contained a box of little treasures.

I like to take pictures of things as I found them. In this case, the box of treasures came with a bunch of sliced almonds. The many joys of trash!

Thankfully, this kind of stuff cleans up pretty easily, and nothing was ruined.

The most unusual object was the “sexographe.” I can’t find any others online, but a few articles discuss it. Apparently it was a tool used to sex chicks, though some people writing about it were very dubious of its functioning, describing Capron as a “charlatan.” It sources an article that sounds like it would have been a lot more in depth, but unfortunately appears to have disappeared from the internet. Based on the font, I’m guessing it was made in the 1900s or 1910s.

The medals were pretty neat. The colourful enameled badge was purportedly made for the 50th anniversary of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, though the only source for that claim is an eBay listing trying to sell it for 299.99 USD. I decided to list mine for 200$ CAD, which I think is probably too high still, but I can always lower the price later.

The 2nd Congress for the French Language in Canada (1937) bronze medal is also impressive. Very art deco. It was designed by Marius Plamondon, who was more well-known for his work in stained glass.  They seem fairly uncommon, but I found another one on a coin/exonumia site listed for 150$, so I listed mine at that price as well.

That little pendant is a wax seal. Sterling I think, though I can’t read the hallmarks and haven’t tested it. I don’t know what that emblem is. The boat reminded me of the New Brunswick flag, but then there’s also some fleur-de-lys, a sun, and a castle.

I still have to research the long, flat thing, though it appears to honour those who fought against the government in the 1837-1838 rebellions.

Photos of the relevant reverse sides are below, plus a closer pic of this funny alpaca card holder (?) made using a 1907 silver coin from Peru. If you have any info about this junk that might be of interest, please share your insights in the comments!

One of my final finds at this spot was a reverse glass painting of the Montreal Historical Society emblem. It was pretty dusty, but it cleaned up nicely and I’m leaning towards keeping it myself. It kind of reminds me of something you’d see in a church basement that hasn’t been renovated since 1960 or so.

Anyways, whoever owned this stuff was clearly into local history. It’s a shame it was tossed, but thankfully I was there to save it!

Otherwise, I haven’t figured out what’s wrong with that Paypal donate widget yet. I think they might have changed their system or something. I’ll try to figure it out before my next post, but in the meantime you can send donations via e-transfer or Paypal directly to my normal email – martin.gregory@gmail.com.

Links

1. My eBay listings. Sign up for eBay (Canada, US). Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US). — These are Ebay Partner Network links. If you create an account or buy something after getting to eBay from here, I get a small cut of the profit!  —
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells. Note that someone else runs the latter.
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Donate to the blog. It costs close to 500$ a year to maintain (no ads, domain name, storage space, etc) which ain’t cheap. Otherwise, it’s nice to get a few bucks for coffee, food, or gas! –Widget currently unavailable–

Too many books / The great re-organization pt.1

garbagefinds11 Comments

Sorry for the long wait. It was a busy year, and after yard sale season ended I became laser-focused on organizing my various spaces.

I might remember 2023 as the “Year of the Book Hauls.” Not just the wackos who tossed a recycling bin (or two) of often antique books almost every week for several months, but also a few other fairly large book hauls, including one at that spot I literally pulled an all-nighter digging through (another memorable experience that I’ll have to expand upon at some point).

I’m happy I saved the books, and have already earned somewhere between a few and several thousand dollars selling the books, but my biggest regret this year was also how I dealt with them. A lot – we’re talking several hundred – ended up in the “yard sale bins,” but it turns out that books really don’t do well at yard sales. Sure, some people will buy some classics, but most just sat collecting dust, while I (and the friends I hire to help at my sales) got plenty of exercise trotting these heavy boxes in and out of my storage spaces. It was not dissimilar to how Sisyphus got a great workout pushing that rock up that hill over and over again.

Also a point of irritation: the space I wasted at yard sales displaying books that rarely sold, when I could have put literally anything else in the same place with better results. I think I would have made about as much money selling vintage underwear than I did selling these books… and the vintage underwear would have weighed a lot less. There were bins that barely made it to sales until the end of the year, because they (the forests) got forgotten for all the books (trees) in the way. The yard sale book strategy was simply not an effective use of space or time.

Anyways, by the end of yard sale season, I was sick of the books. Thankfully my mom and sister were willing to help me sort them. The picture above is the conclusion of a few hours of work, where we assembled 23 boxes of old/antique books – about 360 total – for a bulk sale.

Here’s a couple of the 23 boxes, just as an example. We weeded out newer books, and kept some classics that we thought had a better chance of selling at my sales (even that might have been a mistake, but oh well). Mercifully, someone off Facebook Marketplace came pretty quickly and bought them all for 400$.

Otherwise, about a month earlier I sold five boxes of incomplete sets for 100$ (the prodigious book tossers owned two complete sets of the “Source Records of the Great War”, and two incomplete sets… incredible).

Before that, I sold two boxes of Franklin Library (a company that publishes nice, leather-bound editions of classic works) books for somewhere around 300$.

So, the profit was there (this doesn’t even include the books I sold on eBay, including one that went for 700$). The only issue is that it took me almost a full yard sale season to realize that these “yard sale” books were boat anchors, and that the best way to deal with them was to unload them in bulk. Looking back, I shake my head thinking about how much effort I put into hauling these books around.

“Live and learn” is an apt expression here.

I should also include a quick mention of all the books I ended up curbing or donating. Above is just the purge pile from the day my mom and sister helped – there were many more I decided weren’t worth the effort on different days. If curbed, I always left them in places where I knew lots of people would walk past and pick through them. For donation, I left most in various book exchange boxes, the kind that you see often walking around this city.

There’s still about 300 books in my garage, but at least those are cool ones that need to be listed on eBay, or that I’ve decided I need to research further.

After all that, I was in a mood for a reset. I wanted to get my spaces in order, ideally in a way that would promote superior order going forward. Thankfully, the fall weather held up pretty nicely, affording me lots of time to organize my various spots in relative comfort. First came the Coloniale space, and the many bins of yard sale junk (some of which I hadn’t been good at keeping organized, because of the books). This bin, for example, was just a huge mound of papers that people rarely saw. Most of them were cool, but you can only have so much 1960s-1980s travel ephemera (for example). I left about half of it on the curb for other pickers to dig through.

By the end, everything was in its place. Coloniale is for yard sale stuff, and occasionally overflow. So the junk was purged, the random things that fell by the wayside (and sometimes got moldy) tossed, the hallway raked, and the things that were too fancy, or simply warranted further research were brought to the garage, aka “The Office.”

And I’ll leave it at that for now. Hopefully it doesn’t take me another three months to get to part two.

Links

1. My eBay listings. Sign up for eBay (Canada, US). Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US). — These are Ebay Partner Network links. If you create an account or buy something after getting to eBay from here, I get a small cut of the profit!  —
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells. Note that someone else runs the latter.
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Donate to the blog. It costs close to 500$ a year to maintain (no ads, domain name, storage space, etc) which ain’t cheap. Otherwise, it’s nice to get a few bucks for coffee, food, or gas!