Tag: silver

The finds I crave

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This haul was from the summer of 2020 (my “bumper crop” year), so these pictures have been collecting virtual dust for some time now. Better to post them late than never though, right?

I’d really love to happen upon a pile like this right about now. I’m still picking up loads and loads of books, but there haven’t been many finds of note in the precious metals / jewelry department for some time now.

I remember finding a bunch of coins the first time I stopped here. That was a good omen. In the box were more coins, including some already rolled pennies. Literal easy money.

Otherwise, I picked up some of the usual quality junk …

… and some bits of paper ephemera. My favourite piece here is the letter written to Eaton’s in 1960 complaining about a defective dishwasher. That bridge joke is… let’s go with “dated.”

What made this place notable though was the jewelry and the precious metals. I don’t remember all these pieces after two plus years, but that mechanical pencil was silver for sure.

There were a few bits of silver and gold in here too, most of which also appear in the next pic.

That watch was gold for sure, though it was busted up and not good for much but scrap. That religious pendant next to it was also gold, as were the two earrings to its upper right. There are several silver pieces here, including a little enameled Order Of The Holy Sepulchre medal which might still be kicking around in one of my drawers.

These were my best finds though. The rings boxes alone are decent. The one on the left was sterling, and the Birks one was quite beautiful as well, all done up in deep blue leather with gold accents. I forget what they sold for, but I’d guess they went for around 75-100$ each. The stainless steel one was probably worth around 40$ as well.

The rings inside weren’t much good, but that doesn’t matter when they’re gold. The two in the middle were 14k and made by Birks, but the stones had been forcibly removed making the rings worth nothing outside of their weight in gold. Fortunately, that was still a few hundred dollars. The one in the box on the left was sterling I think (and missing a stone). The earrings, which were stored in that little yellow pouch along with a note, were my best individual find. They were solid 18k gold, and I recently (finally) sold them for a bit above their scrap value (650$).

Looking at this reminds me how great 2020 was for finds. 2021 and 2022 weren’t much good, but here’s hoping 2023 is better, and that I happen upon another nice gold haul soon! There’s nothing quite like finding gold.

I do feel like the trash has been a bit better recently. The books are still flowing, but I also have a few other spots I’m keeping an eye on now. Spring is definitely in the air, though I don’t feel like people are doing much cleaning yet. It’s still a bit chilly, and a fair amount of snow remains.

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 here, I get a small cut of the profit!  —
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells. Note that someone else runs the latter.
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Donate to the blog. It costs close to 500$ a year to maintain (no ads, domain name, storage space, etc) which ain’t cheap. Otherwise, it’s nice to get a few bucks for coffee, food, or gas!

Odds & ends

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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.

Rich people moving – Exhibit A

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Garbage picking can run hot or cold, but I feel like I’ve been on a non-stop hot streak since early July. There’s so many great finds to show you, including at least two “find of the year” candidates.

For now let’s go back to mid-summer, when this recently sold house was a spot of interest. They threw out lots of great stuff that I didn’t get pictures of, like nice kitchenwares and a whole bunch of camping gear because I was so busy with junk from elsewhere On this day I picked up a couple of rugs, which I think sold for around 60-80$ each at the auction house if I remember right.

When you’re rich I guess you can afford to buy 40+ dollar wi-fi light bulbs and then throw them out when you move. These three were sealed in their original plastic, and sold for 20-some bucks at the auction. So the buyer got a pretty good deal, but I got them for free so I can’t complain (plus, there’s fancier models out these days – I think these were made “way back” in 2015). Those lightweight Silhouette rimless frames are always a good find, they’re generally easy to sell on eBay in the 60-100$ range. The Hugo Boss titanium frames should also be easy to sell. There were lots of other eyeglasses, but these were the ones that were most worth sharing.

Not super exciting, but I picked up a whole bunch of nice cleaning supplies as well. I basically don’t have to buy any cleaning products anymore, other than dish soap and laundry detergent. I find those sometimes too, but not often enough to never have to buy them again.

This bag held tourist tchotchkes (ranging in quality from nice to busted), brass doodads, miscellaneous electronics, and the art below, which was made in Greece. They didn’t sell for much at auction, but I thought they were kinda cool.

But as is somewhat common with my summer hauls, the highlight for me was a bunch of jewelry. This collection came in a white shopping bag, which was then placed in a black garbage bag.

As you can see it was tangled up pretty good when I found it. As usual, a good portion wasn’t too exciting, but I was able to pick some pretty nice pieces out of the mess.

In the silver department we have three hefty bangles with black stones (onyx?). Together they weigh around 115 grams, making them worth about an easy 75$ at current scrap prices, though in my opinion they’re too nice to scrap. I’m guessing they were made in Central America, along with that pretty necklace with the green stones which is hallmarked “0925.”  The necklace made from many little rings is also silver. For gold, we have a hefty 14k ring missing its stones (but still worth 3-400$ for scrap given its bulk), one section of a gold clasp, a single 14k earrings with diamonds and a green stone (jade?), and a nice 14k ring with some kind of green stones and a larger one with green and pink speckles.

As for costume stuff, we have a cool rhinestone cat brooch, a brooch that looks to a be a section broken off a larger piece of antique jewelry, a Ben Amun signed necklace, and a Sheffield pendant watch. The latter is a little more fun than the usual pendant watch because it actually has a working pendulum on the bottom. Zoom in for a closer look!

(Not the best pics but still a little better look at a couple of pieces that were less visible in the group shot)

Anyways, this was just one of a few to several rich people moving piles that produced quality finds and jewelry in the past six months or so. I’ll try to share more soon.

Otherwise, I find myself overwhelmed with the amount of stuff to deal with, and it no longer seems feasible to sell it all myself. Even with the help of the auction house, there’s a lot of stuff that will only sell well if the effort is put in. For example, I’m not even sure they’d accept a single pair of Silhouette eyeglasses as a lot, and even if they did I doubt they’d go for more than, say 20$, and then the fees are higher as well. Like I said earlier, they’re pretty easy to sell on eBay, but when you have hundreds if not thousands of items packed away that would be easy to sell on eBay, the prospect of doing getting started is less enticing and the end goal feels a little murky. I want my life to be about more than work, and as things are I probably work harder than I should already.

Thankfully the business has continued to evolve. My picking skills continue to improve, and my eye for quality junk has become more refined in the “auction-house era.” My finances are now pretty stable, in large part thanks to the auction house, and it seems like I might actually be able to pay off my student loans one day. Also, my recent forays into the stock market have been reasonably successful thus far. My lack of emotional attachment to money serves me well there, and not being greedy helps too. (It seems to be that those are the pitfalls of a lot of “retail” investors).

(On a side note, for an intriguing Canadian garbage-related company you can check out Cielo Waste Solutions [CMC.V], a business based in Alberta that has developed a way to turn garbage & junk (anything not metal, apparently) into renewable diesel. It seems like a few other companies are working on similar technology, but there should be room for all of them in the end as the supply for garbage is basically limitless and the need for fuel isn’t going away anytime soon. Anyways, dyodd as they say (do your own due diligence), and don’t blame me if you lose money. However, feel free to praise me if you do).

Anyways, all that to say I’m not so reliant on maximizing the value of every single item anymore. So I’ve recently started outsourcing some of my selling duties to a few different people in exchange for a good cut of the profit. It’s working out pretty well so far – my finds get sold at good prices with little effort or thought on my part, and that is very refreshing. It almost feels too easy. Regardless, it’s a good way to keep things moving out the door, and reduce the mental burden associated with thinking about & looking at the masses of items I’d otherwise have to deal with.

On a related note, in the New Year I want to focus on decluttering my space a bit, better separate my work life from my home life, etc. As things stand, I find I’m pretty easily distracted and have a hard time relaxing, which I think is partly due to always having cool stuff around to look at, but also stress about what to do with. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on going full-on Marie Kondo or anything, but some rearranging couldn’t hurt.

Look at that, the day turned to Christmas while I was writing that screed, so I’ll end on that note. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and etc! Also. let’s hope 2021 is better than this one.