There is not much traffic on my street, yet I have a good record of having stuff picked up from the curb. A gas grill took 20 minutes, a sofa took two days. Yesterday, it was my old power mower. Gone in just over 10 minutes.
Engine is shot, but with a few internal parts it will be a good mower for someone. If the guy picking it up fixes and sells it at reasonable price, there will be three winners in the chain.
Hey, I wonder, if I sit a couple of family members by the curb if anyone will take them?
Last year I was helping my sister clean out her husbands work shop and get rid of some of the clutter he had accumulated before he died. We put a couple of things down by the curb and went back to the shop. When I noticed a guy with a big trailer stop to pick the stuff up, I went down and asked him if he wanted more. He backed his trailer up to the door of the work shop and loaded him up.
Turns out he was an older guy from another town 40 miles away that made extra money by just driving around looking for metal things people put out by the road and he picks up the stuff and takes it to the junk yard to sell.
So when I cleaned out my basement and garage, I decided to see how much I could get at the junk yard for my stuff and loaded up my nephew's pickup and took it to the junk yard and wound up with a couple hundred dollars in my pocket.
If you've never done that before, where I went, I just drove up on the scales at the junk yard, a person at the window wrote down my license plate number and the weight of the truck loaded. Then I drove around to place to unload and a guy with a big magnet on a crane just lowered the magnet down over the back of the truck several times and unloaded all the junk. Then I drove back over the scales again so the person at the window noted the weight of the truck again and I parked and went inside and they gave me the cash. Easy as pie.
I did have a bucket of copper that was more involved. It was dealt with separately and had to show identification and fingerprinted and such.
Around here there have been a lot of vacant homes with all the plumbing stolen, and the local scrap yards have started doing photo ids of any sellers of scrap metals.
There is so much stuff that's like this. The trick is getting the cast off or damaged stuff to the right people. In the bicycling world there are quite a few companies that use old bicycle tires, tubes, parts, and even frames as semi-raw materials to create new biking stuff.
I tried it and, nope, it doesn't work. People kept dumping them out of the lawn chair and just taking the lawn chair.
Mebbe- got any that know how to use tools, can actually work, and aren't TOO mouthy? I could use a helper for a few weeks. I'd even feed them and give them a place to sleep in out of the rain, and maybe even pay them a little, before I sent them back.
Pickers often show up around here right when it's time to trundle the garbage to the street. Seen them get stuff I put by the street with a minute or 2. One time I hadn't finished hauling all the metal from my garage to the street. Saw a couple guys pull over across the street in the usual beat up pickup, so I waved them over to get 4 shot batteries I had stacked in the garage. They hesitated, then got out and came over, heads down, wearing billed baseball caps, baggy clothes. When they got next to me, I thought, man these are tiny guys. Then one of them looked up at me. They were pretty girls.
Seems like a law enforcement issue with common thievery. Around here "front yard" across the sidewalk from the house is technically village property. That's about 15' wide. You mow the lawn, but the trees are theirs. Only place on that front yard where somebody would consider taking something is right by the driveway apron from sidewalk to street. I put stuff on the grass corner there when I don't want it encroaching the driveway. Never saw the pickers even step on my property or the village strip, except the time I invited them closer. What's for the taking can be reached from the street. Of course that's here, and other street/property layouts are different. I can see where it could be a problem. Too many thieves. Reminds me of the time I was working on my car in Chicago, in front of the house where I rented a garden apartment. Residential neighborhood of homes, mostly frame. I had left some new parts on the little sidewalk from street to main sidewalk. Not 8 feet away from me where I was working. I kid about 6 years old comes off the main sidewalk and picked up a set of wiper blades. His ma was waiting for him, as she had told him to fetch it. Couldn't believe it. I actually had to say "Hey! That's mine, give it here," and take it from him. His ma is yelling "It's on the sidewalk!" WTF? Thieves raise thieves. .
Heh! I sometimes drive around the neighborhood the night before heavy trash pickup. My best score was a military jerry can. Stenciled on the bottom is the legend:
"III Army - Sep 1944"
My little can may have helped George Patton liberate Bastonge.
Even more elightened, and what I forgot to mention, is the fact that after 24 hrs, anything not taken away by pickers is hauled off and dumped by the city, at no cost to the residents.
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