Things I find in the garbage

It’s been a fairly busy summer, although not busy enough to excuse such a long wait between posts. Things were slow but steady for a while, then a couple weeks of regularly filled cars, and now something in between. I didn’t have much luck on the precious metals front for a little while, but in recent weeks that’s picked up again as well. I did have a very busy Labour Day weekend, doing ~12 hour days between yard sales and picking.

Also, now that my mom is in town and living nearby, I’ve gotten her into the “family business”. She’s listing some stuff for me, and I’ve also given her a couple more complicated projects that I didn’t have time to focus on. I might talk a bit more about all that in my next post.

Early in the summer, someone threw out a big collection of CDs and DVDs over a couple of weeks. I had pretty much given up on the spot, figuring they were done decluttering or whatever, but then found a bit more stuff there including a Canon camera, nice stones, and a coin collection ft. silver. They seem to be done now, but I’ll keep an eye on the situation. There were probably 3x the number of CDs than there are in that picture, but I sold a bunch to a local store and some to friends. I brought the rest to a local auction place along with all the DVDs last week, and they are currently up for bidding. All the DVDs are in this one lot, minus a few box sets I gave to other sellers.

Here’s a few random finds. I just picked up that chair this week, it seems to be someone’s unfinished project piece. It has enough little flaws that maybe they gave up on finishing it, but it’s very throne-like and might be fun at a yard sale. If you remember the ones from the spring, I’ve had pretty good luck finding SLR/DSLR cameras this year. I give those to a friend to sell, she knows a lot more about them than I do.

And we’ll finish off with a couple treasures. Above are a few things I saved from a bin earlier in the summer. The picture turned out badly, but the compact is gold plated 800 silver featuring a nice enamel portrait. The single earring was 18k and pretty hefty, so worth several hundred dollars just for scrap. On the right is an Honest Ed 80th Birthday watch, maybe I’ll ad a better picture of that later. It’s not gold unfortunately, but a fun bit of Canadian/Torontonian history regardless.

Below is a bit of jewelry I picked up on a rainy day last week. Most of the necklaces were really tangled, perhaps to the point where they tossed them due to a mix of frustration and apathy. Most were Swarovski, and one was a fine 14k gold piece with lots of colourful stones (the top piece inside the box).

There’s a lot more to share, and hopefully I’ll get it done relatively soon!

I’ve always had an interest in hidden treasures, although I never made much time for it. I got a basic but good metal detector for my 19th birthday (I think, that was an eternity ago), but only really used it a few times. I had other priorities.

Recently, I got interested in trying it again. My old metal detector didn’t seem to detect much of anything anymore, so I left it on the curb and bought a new one late last year. Winter came early though, so I didn’t have a chance to really use it until this year.

At my new place my landlords/friends live on the ground floor. They were doing some gardening and yard work, which seemed like a good excuse to bring out the metal detector. We mostly dug up old rusty nails, but there was one reading coming from fairly deep which got me digging further. It was just a piece of old sheet metal, but I was also digging up pottery sherds and old glass. So I convinced them to let me dig a hole, peddling tales of finding a cache of gold coins to get them excited.

(We all knew this was mostly a joke though – the odds of finding gold in this part of the Plateau were probably worse than the odds of winning the lottery. Most of the people who lived in this part of town originally moved there to work in or around the nearby limestone quarry).

The metal detector quickly became useless, because most of the interesting finds were not metal. In the first picture you can see a bit of a glass bottle poking out, in the second was the biggest pottery sherd I managed to save.

These were all my finds after maybe 4-5 hours digging. I ended up spending probably like 18-20 hours in that hole overall.

And here’s a display of some of my finds after all that digging. There was a lot more of the relatively common items (ie: nails and random rusty iron/steel, plain white porcelain, bones and relatively clear glass), but it wouldn’t have been photogenic. Below are some of my favourite finds, including unusual coloured glass, sherds of transferware and stoneware jugs, and a whole bunch of clay pipe fragments. I’m able to date one of the clay pipe as being made between 1805 and 1891 (most likely close to the latter), because it had the markings of William White of Glasgow, whose factory operated in that time-frame.

I also enjoyed finding the buttons, a single brass ring, and a clay marble (I found another, in red clay, after taking this photo). However, the top finds in my mind were the segments of a broken bisque doll, and an odd piece that seems to be dated 1902. There is a horseshoe motif and some faint writing underneath, which I’ll try to decipher with wax paper at some point. I think it is bisque as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the rest.

At first I was actually hoping this was the location of an old outhouse, as sometimes those can produce fun finds. But in the end, I’m not sure this was even dump digging. Instead, I’m pretty sure this was just a spot where they dumped some landfill a long time ago, maybe to even out the yard or something. With privy digging or dump digging, you’d expect to find more of each item in the same place, but this stuff almost seemed like it was tossed in a blender before being dumped. I’d find one piece over here, one over there, and never anything that seemed complete.

It also made digging pretty difficult. That’s the main reason I think I’m done with this particular hole. The quantity of finds has dried up, but also some of the layers in there are basically like rock. My hands in particular felt pretty worn out … it was good exercise though! I got about 3 feet deep in places.

However, it was a pretty fun experience, and I think I got an interesting hands-on look at what garbage looked like in the early 1900s. Maybe I’ll expand on the experience in my book. Regardless, I look forward to digging more holes in the future in the hopes of finding a different kind of trash than I’m used to.

As for regular trash, the July 1 moving day was pretty mediocre but at least I got some exercise biking and walking around. The trash otherwise hasn’t been super bountiful lately, but I’m still finding some things. Sometimes the summer is a little slower because people are going on vacation, visiting friends and family and whatnot.