April 2021 – Things I find in the garbage

This was one of my more exciting spots last fall. They started tossing right around when someone living just up the street stopped.

On one of my best days here I found a bunch of loose jewelry in a bin. There was a bit more inside some black trash bags.

Overall I saved about 3.25 pounds of jewelry. A small portion of that was silver and gold.

I thought that ring in the gold pile might be white gold, but it turns out that stainless steels holds up well against the testing acid. Regardless, I can’t complain about this haul. The bottom right piece was designer costume jewelry, I forget by who.

Don’t worry, that’s just an air gun. It sold for good money at auction though. Otherwise, I found a couple camcorders, cell phones, a Blackberry tablet, two iPods, and a bit more silver & gold jewelry (I wish I took a close-up photo of that bunch). On the right is a David Yurman sterling silver money clip that I sold on eBay for just north of 200$.

The suitcases in the first picture emerged on one of the last productive trash days. A couple of them produced quality finds.

That little wooden box held a set of old weights, as well as two golden nuggets.

They’re heavy, and test as high purity gold, so I think that’s what they are! It seemed that there was at least a couple generations of dentists in this family, so I’m assuming these would have been used in dental fillings. With a combined weight of about 18 grams, and assuming they’re 20k or above, these little pebbles are worth about a grand in scrap.

Other notables include a marcasite and silver bracelet, a silver “US Air Force Strategic Air Command” ring, and a Jaeger le Coultre travel alarm watch. It didn’t work at all, but being a nice brand I was still able to sell it for a bit over 200$. All in all this was certainly one of my best spots of the year.

I had some luck Tuesday in NDG last week, but car troubles set me back Wednesday thru Friday. Hopefully this week I’ll end my cold spell, which has been going for around three months now. Fortunately, preceding that was a roughly six month long hot streak, so the lull isn’t bothering me too much (besides being boring).

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two years since I first picked at this spot and I still have bins full of their stuff to look through. Recently, I got sick of seeing it take up space on my shelves. I did some sorting and took some photos, but many items went straight to the yard sale bin. Some of those things might have been fun to blog about normally, but at a certain point it’s more fun to deal with “fresh” junk.

Now all I have left is a couple shelves full of old photos and paper ephemera. There’s some very cool stuff in there, but I have to find a way to document it in a condensed way. My tendency is to want to take pictures of everything, but it’s just not realistic to do so.

Anyways, here’s a whole bunch of junk. Still lots more to come… Zoom in for a better look! (Edit: WordPress has made some changes and for some reason these photos aren’t clickable… I’ll try to figure this out for the next blog post).

I really enjoyed finding this collection of old seeds. These ones probably date from between the 50s and 70s. The images on the older packets are particularly nice.

I’d guess that these date to the 40s based on that graphic design. I wondered if old seeds could have value because they might be “heirloom” varieties, but I’m not sure how that works.

I found a lot of old fabrics here, including some antique clothes that won’t be making the blog (I hate taking pictures of clothes). This hunk of black fabric probably dates to the 20s or 30s. One thing’s for sure, that factory is long gone (that address isn’t too far from where I live).

This carefully wrapped package ended up containing a hunk of very old plain burlap.

I saved lots of bits of fabric that probably served a purpose several decades ago. What purpose, I have no idea.

I do know what handkerchiefs are for, even if I don’t use them. One of these had a name and the year “1887” written on it.

I also saved these two cute sewing boxes.

I haven’t had much luck at all for over a month now. A lot of times I’ve come back empty-handed or close, though at least last week I found a couple pieces of sterling. I continue to feel unmotivated, probably due to “pandemic brain.” I have lots to share, but I haven’t been able to muster the focus necessary to do so.

Month: April 2021

Just up the street

Part one of a million pt.10