Tag: garbage

April pt.1

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It’s been a busy month. Spring is here, the trash has been bountiful, and I’ve done three sales in the past two weeks (with another planned for tomorrow). There were so many good finds that it’ll take a couple posts to share them, and that’s not including the stuff I’m holding for potential individual posts.

One spot produced boxes full of brand new pottery from China. Over two weeks, I accumulated about 3x what you see above, all of it wrapped nicely in foam and bubble wrap. Some had price tags in yuan on them; the ones that did were priced equivalent to 15-20 CAD each. I’m pretty picky about my pottery, but I thought these were pretty good quality. Nonetheless I was worried that they wouldn’t sell well at my yard sale, as dishes aren’t usually a hot commodity, but I’ve already sold about 2 boxes worth. I also picked up some packaged food which was either not expired or lightly expired, some of which I’ve been eating. I haven’t seen anything here in the last couple weeks, but I’d be willing to take more free food and pottery if it’s offered.

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It was a big month for Lego as well. This spot especially – most of the bags were packing material, but a few were stuffed with Lego. All in all I saved about 15kg (33lbs) along with some instruction books, all of which sold for a bit over 200$. At another house, I saved another 8kg or so, which sold for like 182$.

I recently rediscovered the local auction house, the type that focuses on pretty mundane stuff like this. So far, I’ve been pretty happy with the prices realized. I’ll get into that more in a future post, but this strategy turns Lego into “easy money.”

Here’s some of the more miscellaneous finds of the month. That bent mirror was sterling, and contributed somewhere between 100-150 grams (who can remember?) to my scrap pile.

As for treasures, I’ve found a bunch. The second batch was actually from March, but who’s keeping track? The first batch is mostly silver and a little bit of white gold, a reduction from a larger collection, while the second were three pieces inside a slightly busted glass-topped box, all of which were gold.

I guess I’ve also been busy watching Canadiens playoff hockey (or listening on TSN 690 if I want to go out for a trash run). It’s been a fun run so far, here’s hoping for a good game tonight against Buffalo! The city is a lot more fun when the team is contending … and it also helps me sell my Canadiens stuff at yard sales. Anyways, I’m planning to do one tomorrow, and will post the deets soon on my garbage.news announcement page.

The photographer

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I went out for a walk on one of the first truly warm days of the year. I was headed for my storage space, although I forget exactly why. This being a blog about finding things in the garbage, you might not be surprised to hear that I spotted a huge pile on my way there.

I think I was the first to stop and look. Some guys were still bringing new things out when I got there. I asked about bugs and they indicated there were none. However, whoever owned this stuff struggled with cleaning, and probably did a bit of hoarding too. Also, they were a smoker, although the stink was pretty moderate compared to some places I’ve picked at.

I sifted through many bags filled with grimy junk in hopes of finding a buried treasure. I spent about three hours digging, and made a little pile (on the left in the photo above). At some point it was big enough that I carried it to my garage and then came back and started a new pile. About 1.5 hours in, some others started showing up and poking around. I talked to some 20 something about why people throw out photos, and another guy who was poking around handed me a camera bag (with camera) that I had missed.

The guy was definitely into photography. I saved a couple albums, most of which are well composed nature shots, many probably taken in the park facing the building. More importantly for my finances, I saved two Nikon cameras from the early 2010s (including the one that guy handed to me). They were very well cared for (unlike a lot of the other stuff), and in near mint condition apart from the moderate cigarette stench. I tossed the bags, straps, and other components that would be hard to de-smell, and gave the cameras to a friend who knows a lot more than I do about them. She was able to freshen them up and test them, and she’ll sell them in exchange for a cut. I should make some decent money once it’s all said and done, though it may take a while.

My favourite find though was this ring, which I found near the end of my three hours of digging. It was amongst a bunch of junky bric-a-brac at the bottom of a big black bag. It’s got Soviet hallmarks, a hammer and sickle with the number 583, which was the Soviet standard for 14k gold (elsewhere, 585). The ruby is almost certainly lab grown, apparently they were in style there back in the day. The raised setting is pretty cool, and makes this a fairly flashy cocktail-style ring. It looks like it was only lightly used, if at all.

Based on eBay’s sold listings, I think this is probably worth about 1k CAD, give or take, but I’m not in a rush to sell it. For now it’s still a cool reminder that trash can be very good, even when it’s messy and smells like Export As.

In other news, I made a little website. Introducing garbage.news, a way to promote my yard sales without clogging up this blog, or making people log into Instagram or other websites. It’s a very basic page that I hope is pretty straightforward, just put in your email and hit subscribe! If you don’t have a WordPress account, it appears to make you a basic profile that is linked to your email, but you don’t have to use it. Anyways, sign up now and I’ll send out a test post in the coming days to see how it’s working. It did well in beta testing (my mom and sister basically, ha ha) but depending on your email provider they may go to “spam” or “social” – if so, I think if you move them to your regular inbox, they’ll go there in the future. Please let me know here if there are any issues in signing up or otherwise.

On a side note, when I chose that domain, I was trying to find something that would be easy to remember. But I also thought it was a good investment gamble. I figure there is a non-0% chance that someone might want to buy the garbage.news domain someday!

The 5 million dollar house

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One of my most recent spots was a big house in a nice neighbourhood. It had been put on the market, and I guessed it was going for 5 million. I checked online and it turns out I was just about right, although I would have lost by Price is Right rules – 4.995m. It was a nice, if bland house with a sweet swimming pool. When I’m picking the trash of people this well off, I’m hoping they go “full privilege.” In my financial position, I can spend 1-10$ and not really regret it at all. I assume that some of the people that make 100x what I do, probably feel the same way about 100-1000$ transactions.

These guys never went full privilege, to their credit. No gold, not much jewelry. A lot of empty Hermes boxes, but only a couple of Hermes products (perfumes). I saved a bunch of clothes, but most were really boring so I donated them. Same with the household and kitchen stuff.

Of course I did save a few notable things, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting about it. One day a bunch of picture frames got tossed; I took some yard sale quality ones and left some junkier ones. This one looks pretty plain, but was easily the most valuable of that bunch. It’s a solid silver Tiffany frame, and given that it weighs over 100 grams, it’s worth about 400$ for scrap. Given the dents, scratches, and other defects, I think that’s all it is, but obviously a find like that makes my trash run worthwhile.

I also made a decent amount of money from these iPhones. It’s very rare that I find an iPhone that isn’t locked to iCloud (and therefore essentially a brick), but I usually give them a charge just in case. It turned out that two of the three were reset prior to being tossed. They both had a couple issues, one with the camera and one with a cracked back screen, but they were relatively modern (iPhone 11 Pro Max and iPhone 13 Pro Max), and I was able to easily sell them to a local business for 150$ and 195$ respectively. In the past I would have sold them on eBay, but this way saved me a lot of hassle and I think the price was very fair. The 3rd one is doomed to the e-waste pile unfortunately.

Other decent if unexciting finds include a couple small pieces of silver, a nice pewter wine funnel, and some new-in-box Wifi doohickies I was able to sell pretty easily on eBay for 80$ a pop. These folks have since moved, but this spot was nice while it lasted.

I decided to quit Instagram the other day. I just don’t like what the app has become. I first joined in 2015 when it was a fun, casual space. Now it’s all about reels, AI slop, and promoting addictive (and often fake) information. Funny enough though, after I quit I started having the temptation to post again. However, I think I can just post the same type of content here, where there are no ads and no BS. So, maybe I’ll do a new type of post soon, once I get enough random pictures to make it worthwhile.

I’ve been fairly lucky recently. Last week I had a couple nice gold hauls, from spots that were easy to pick. This week, I’ve come across two hoarder type piles, which were a lot of work to sort through and provided no easy money. However, there’s no way to know what you’re going to find, and who knows, maybe the easy money is coming next week. Also, the hoarder piles tend to produce more interesting yard sale quality junk.