Finds in the wild question?

[Spawn67]

Ever score a toy or any other cool thing in the wild? I don't mean a yard sale. I mean in the woods, backyard, even in a garbage can..haha. One of my favorite scores was finding a marx dinasour set with cavemen as a kid in my friends backyard we still to this day don't know how it got there, I still have it as well. Not to far from that spot a friend of mine found a civil war gun in the woods that he got a pretty penny for years later. Nowdays just driving through the neighborhoods i live in I can't believe what people throw away. I got a brand new dresser with a tiny scratch on it being thrown away. iIinstantly snached it up.I also scored a vcr to dvd recorder being thrown away that works great.Anyone else have some stories to tell?

[Mikey]

hmmmm,

I did a dumpster dive for a decent Fender Squier

[spacecaps]

Once when I was in High School, I took some clothes to the parking lot good-will dump. These things are marked "Clothes Only" but left outside the bin was a pile of toys. Most of it was Fisher-Price stuff, but there was an Ewok Village Playset that I took home. When I got it home, I discovered it was FILLED with a colony of living spiders of the Daddy Long-Legs variety.

[Rallygirl]

I admit it, I am a grade-A, level 1, top-notch scavenger. My parents instilled thriftiness in me through hand-me-downs, garage sales, auctions, and thrift stores. However, I took it to a whole new level in college while working at a local mall. Only weeks after starting my shoe store job, I learned about the immense amount of "damaged" product that goes into mall dumpsters. Damaged could mean as little as torn packaging and I frequently found myself scaling dumpsters to claim some of those treasures for myself. While I don't usually find toys, I have scavenged lots of other items.

These days, my scavenging usually consists of roadside garage can rescues. I have walked two miles with an end table on my back because I spotted it minutes from being compacted while I was walking the dog. I carried a wrought iron headboard home a couple miles as well. I once fought someone over a carousel horse, and sadly, lost. I spotted the chairs, currently sitting on my front porch, alongside the road in someone's garbage while coming back from a date. I made my date stop and load them into his truck. After that embarrassing display of cheapness, I never would have guessed that we (me, the chairs, and the guy) would still be together fifteen years later. LOL The glass-top coffee and end tables in my living room also came from someone's roadside trash; a little sandpaper, spray paint, and they too have graced my house for more than fifteen years.

Nowadays, Ed even encourages my scavenging a little bit. He clued me in to a site where leftover construction materials from a huge new mansion on Lake Michigan were being dumped. I took a ride by and spotted terra cotta tiles. After speaking with the site manager, my parents, sister and I picked up thousands of beautiful custom tiles,...all thrown away because the rich owners changed their minds about the pattern on the tiles before they were even installed. What am I going to tile? I don't know, but I can tile a heck of a lot of it!