montreal – Page 4 – Things I find in the garbage

Moving day madness

July 8, 2025July 8, 2025 garbagefinds6 Comments

The move is all done. It sucked, as moving always does, but it’s over. I’m lucky that my family came to help move stuff and get me organized. I think I was reasonably well prepared, but the process always ends up being a bit harder than you anticipate. It certainly acts as a booster shot of “garbage empathy.” I totally get how good people can get overwhelmed and end up throwing quality stuff in the garbage when dealing with a lot of stuff at once. Of course this is humanity we’re talking about, so some of the tossers are just idiots, but I try not to judge too hard except in egregious cases.

I kept doing trash runs during the big week, mostly keeping up on past producers. One of my finds is better saved for a book, but here are some of the others. I came across this pile on Clark while out to get a donut. Inside the bags some cool vintage trash, including a broken 10k gold chain, a pink glass lighter, and this vintage depression glass measuring cup made for Kellogg’s. These sell for 40$ or so, but I’m going to keep it for my new place.

I also saved a few old books, one of which had this 1955 auction notice stuck between the pages. It sounds like they were clearing out an entire farm, including the beds and probably the kitchen sink. I don’t find these very often!

I moved some of my bigger things with a truck on Monday, and then the rest on Tuesday. I went out for trash on Monday night, but got a late start and didn’t try too hard. My most notable find was this bronze trophy made for the 2nd ever U-16 FIFA tournament, which was held in Canada in 1987. The Canadian team did pretty badly, but this appears to have been given out to celebrate a successful event. I couldn’t find another online, so maybe some Quebec soccer fan will pay good money for it.

On July 1st I went out again, this time after moving stuff for about six hours earlier in the day and a few more hours of organizing & cleaning at the old place. The route was quiet to start, and then got busy near the end. I got home at around 1am, so it was a long but productive day. Anyways, I offer you a “reduction” of the finds from that night, which included a couple of Cesca chairs (one of which is Italian), some Rio tuna snacks that expire in 2027 (which retail at around 3$ each, and many of which I ate in the first days at my new place), a couple of nice glass figurines, and a pair of 10k white gold cufflinks that I scrounged from the bottom of a bag.

And of course July 1 is Moving Day here in Montreal. A lot of people assume this is a great day for me, but in my opinion it’s pretty overrated. There is a lot of garbage, but the people who are moving are generally younger and not all that wealthy, so their junk isn’t usually very exciting or interesting. Also, everyone and their dog knows about moving day, so there’s a lot of competition, including people who just rip through all the bags and make a huge mess (like above, and I saw much worse).

Anyways, long story short I didn’t have any FOMO from not being able to pick as much trash because I was moving, and most of my finds (except maybe the Kellogg’s cup, and even then I’m not sure) were likely completely unrelated to the Moving Day phenomenon.

My last notable finds of the week came while walking around the neighbourhood with my mom on Friday the 4th. I did a little before (left) and after (right) photoshoot to show how I leave things tidy, unlike some of the competition. You can see some sunglasses through the bag, most of which were pretty cheap, but they were a good indicator that the bags were worth investigating.

Inside I found what was probably some kid’s old jewelry. There’s always some low quality junk in collections like this, but I picked out a few quality pieces including three Pandora silver pieces that look legit, two Swatches, and a pair of Ray Bans. I basically “made” a couple hundred bucks of product just from walking around on a nice day. There are worse ways to make a living.

I still have some setting up to do at home, but maybe once that’s done I’ll share some pictures of my favourite trash decor. Otherwise, the garbage keeps on flowing, and I’ll post more finds here soon enough.

(Also, I’m looking to replace the blurb below with something more concise, but I’ll post it again now because I haven’t shared this info in a while)

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 these links, I get a small cut of the profit!
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefindssells on Instagram (this is managed by a friend, I’ve quit Instagram for the time being)
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Help support the blog, or just buy me a coffee! PayPal link below.

McGill move-out 2025 / The hoarder

May 7, 2025 garbagefinds14 Comments

Well, another university move-out day has come and gone, which means that it’s now summer (if only in my mind). I’m sure I wrote about this last year, but these days I treat the day(s) like a treasure hunt. I’m not interested in clothes and food and books and whatnot. I’m after the gold and silver jewelry, and to a lesser extent coins.

By focusing on one class of item, I can quickly move from pile to pile and not get overwhelmed by the massive quantities of junk. Of course, I’ll pick up other things if I happen upon them while searching for the treasure (this year: lamps, a nice framed page from some 1800s newspaper, quality pencils and markers, etc.), but it’s more fun when I don’t take it all that seriously.

Given the demographic (very young people, who may or may not come from money), a lot of the jewelry is terrible. I’d say about 95% is fast fashion junk that was garbage from the day it was made. But inevitably, some nicer stuff gets mixed in.

Here is my reduction of all the jewelry, to just the precious metals. On the top left is the gold. That 14k ring is worth about 200$ for scrap, which was probably about half of what I earned over the two days. The rest is silver, or gold plated silver. The middle bracelet is Italian silver, and the bottom one is Thai. One of the links of the latter was stretched out making it “broken”, but I was able to fix that pretty easily.

All in all, not a bad haul. I spent around 8 hours biking around in the sun on what were two very nice days, and probably found about 400$ worth of stuff. There are certainly worse ways to make a living.

Otherwise, a hoarder house is starting to toss stuff again after a long pause. I say hoarder, because I can’t imagine why a single household would need over 100 bars of soap. And this was just from one night! The week before, I found a few other packs, and I’m currently using soap I found there last year. I also found 9 unused Brita tap filters, and the recycling bin is often full of every magazine this person ever owned. But it’s all very clean, so it’s fun to dig through. Hopefully, they continue the purge for my benefit. I already have enough found soap for five years at least, so the plan is to sell these at yard sales or give them to friends.

Kananaskis pt.2 / snow week

February 20, 2025 garbagefinds6 Comments

Well we got another big dump of snow here – about 70cm of snow in 5 days! Garbage collection across the city has been cancelled for the week, which has never happened as long as I’ve lived here. Just as well, because I wouldn’t have done much exploring anyways with the streets like this.

That seems like a good time to finish up with the stuff from this spot. I now have one less collection of old finds on the shelves of my garage, although this was one of the smaller ones.

I saved a whole bunch of postcards from this house, most of which were from the WWI era. These ones are known as real photo postcards, or RPPCs. Basically, a photo printed on postcard paper. Sometimes they can sell for a lot of money, usually when the subject is unusual. I doubt mine are worth a lot, but they’re still cool and blog-worthy. Zoom in for a closer look!

Some had writing on the back, but it was all written in German so I have no idea what was said.

These ones are a from a little later, featuring the Wehrmacht – the Nazi Germany military forces.

I also found some negatives from that era. There’s around 30-40 of various subjects, including some boat flying a Nazi flag.

Back to circa World War I. Here’s a bunch of regular postcards. These are very much from another time, which is an obvious thing to say given that they’re about 110 years old. Zoom in for a closer look!

There were a few little cards too, which I’m guessing came from cigarette packs.

Here’s a few miscellaneous photos and etc. I think that patch is probably from the 1936 Berlin Olympics – I also found a program from that Olympics, but it was in pretty rough shape.

I decided to list the military ones in three different lots. I doubt they’ll sell for a huge amount, but we’ll see what happens. You can see them on my eBay, the bidding is due to end Sunday night.

As for the stuff from part one, it all found a good home with a researcher and I got 500 big ones for my efforts. That included all the prisoner of war related stuff from my last post plus this batch of POW mail. I consider that a pretty ideal destination for these artifacts.

I’m not sure what my next post will be about yet. Old finds? Recent finds? We’ll see!