Month: February 2022

Sorry for the lack of posts, it’s been a pretty blah month on the mental health front. I guess February sucks for a lot of people in general, but this year is particularly bad as a few good friends have moved away and I’m more alone than I’ve ever been. Plus, it’s a lot harder to meet new people when you’re 34 going on 35, it’s the middle of winter, you struggle with depression & anxiety, and there’s nothing going on in a never-ending pandemic. The garbage has largely sucked too, and I’m meeting an unusual amount of angry people with good garbage that apparently really needs to go to the dump and not somewhere useful for some reason (I’ll get more into that in my next post). I’ve found a few good things, but it’s hard not to wonder about “career path” in these trying times, though I’m sure things will turn around eventually. I’m very much looking forward to spring, but that’s still a ways off.

On the plus side, I finally started using Chit Chats Express for most of my eBay shipping. I heard about it years ago, but for a while their only location was out in Ville St Laurent, and driving out there would offset any savings. Now they have a drop-off location on St-Denis, which is much more convenient. I’d say that I save 5-10$ on most packages, and sometime more than that. Other times it’s more or less the same, and only once was the Chit Chat’s rate a bit higher (for shipping a big Ham radio to Washington State). It also offers tracking on low-value packages that I normally wouldn’t track, due to the extra cost (for example, a 25$ poster to the States costs 6-7$ with tracking, when Canada post would be 12-13$ with no tracking or 18-19$ with – I don’t usually have a problem shipping low-value items without tracking, but it’s still nice to have for both me and the customer).

Anyways, I would recommend them anyone who ships things on a regular basis. I’ve saved probably 150-200$ just in the couple months I’ve been using it, and they have lots of locations across Canada now it seems. Please use my referral code if you do, that way you’ll get 5$ free and I’ll make a few bucks when you start shipping (I believe it’s 10 cents per package in the first month of you using the service).

In other good news I figured out how to get the old WordPress editor back (apparently just needed a “widget”), so now I can quit whining about that. Also, I decided to bring back the Paypal “donate” widget (which stopped working for some reason) because that’s what most bloggers do. Most say “buy me a beer,” but you can also help with blog expenses. It costs about 450$ a year to pay for the WordPress stuff (extra storage space for pics, no ads), and I wouldn’t need as big of a garage if I didn’t blog. Plus the time it takes to make these photo arrangements. Of course I’ve kind of sucked at this blogging thing for a while now, but hopefully one day my brain will cooperate again.

Anyways, this apartment building produced a nice haul in early January. Not much since… but I still check on it.

 

With apartment building trash you’re bound to find a lot of crap, so I only stop if the garbage pile is interesting. That vintage card table set and mirror was enough to get me to stop the car, and then I discovered that the bags were full of kitchen & dining wares. This short video shows you the sound a bag full of kitchenwares makes. The sound and look of the bags helps me differentiate the good stuff from the bad, the latter of which comprises the vast majority of what we call “garbage.”

All in all I picked out about two big bags worth of stuff, as well as the card table and mirror. There was some breakage, which is common when people throw ceramics and glasswares into bags and then drag them to the curb, but plenty of quality stuff survived.

There was lots of silverplate, but some was pretty worn out and best scrapped (the plated brass and copper is worth decent money at the yard). That serving dish at the top right had its original glass insert, which is pretty uncommon (at least with trash silverplate). That odd looking thing at the bottom right is a vintage “cake comb.”

I found a few things in protective Birks drawstring bags. The nicest piece is probably that cake server on the bottom. Based on my research, it’s a solid silver piece made by Hippolyte Thomas in France sometime in the 1850s. You can see (and zoom in on) the hallmarks below. I don’t find stuff that old particularly often, so that’s fun. It’s probably worth around 150-200$.

A couple of other favs include this early mid-century Pillivuyt porcelain pot, which managed to escape its trip to the curb without any damage. I sold it via the @garbagefindssells Instagram (managed by someone else, but I post occasionally) for 40$, which I think was a good deal.

Also nice was this old decanter with a silver top. Below are the hallmarks, which show that it was made in Birmingham, England in 1911, probably by John Grinsell & Sons. Haven’t figured out a price yet but I’m thinking it’s worth around 100$.

Anyways that’s all for now. Hopefully I can get another post up soon. It’s not for a lack of stuff, just a lack of brain power.