Mainz has been named “City of Science 2011.” At work last week, I wrote a short article reporting this fact. As I read through schedules and perused press photos, I became more and more agitated. The first event on the calendar was a tour of various institutions (all still under construction) that are alleged to add to the city’s intellectual status. Many of these pictures were of the big ugly gray monstrosity that they are building directly behind our community. Behold, the new chemistry building! On second thought, I’d rather spare you the view. (But if you insist, you can see a before and after picture of the old site here.)
If you weren’t around to read about it at the time, I’ll fill you in. Our community used to be twice its current size. Then the university decided that another gray glass and concrete block was just the thing. In an incredible bit of luck, however, they offered us a deal—if we went quietly, they would sell us a second piece of land that we could then pay off slowly and with no interest. I moved here right around the time that the group split. Just in time for jack-hammer mornings and dust-storm afternoons. These days the new building is tall enough to block the afternoon sun, and I often wonder what happened to the hedgehogs that used to live in the brush around us.
In pictures I’ve seen of the Wagenplatz when it was first squatted, everything is wilder; the paths are fewer and less trodden, the borders between Platz and university not yet so concretely defined. Now buildings loom at us from all sides, and we are one of the few green oases amidst concrete and highway and buildings that have “this design was inspired by a Borg ship” written all over them. Despite this, and perhaps because of it, our community remains a haven. We shake our fists at the buildings that loom over us, remember how much more beautiful the land looked dotted with colorful tiny dwellings, and with a sigh we get on with our lives and hope that they don’t one day come for us.
This weekend I had the rare chance to take some aerial photos of my finished wagon. So we must look to the magpies that I watch from my bedside window:
And to round things out with something new: a photo of our guest trailer, a three-meter, metal-sided number that’s cozy as hell:
When I returned to Frankfurt after six months of futile novel-writing in Dresden (futile, because of the eventual simultaneous crashing of both my regular hard drive and my back up hard drive), I didn’t have a new apartment lined up. One thing led to another, and I eventually ended up living in the trailer pictured above: The little old woman who lived in a shoe.
That first trailer was a guest trailer, part of a community of 40(ish) folks living in wooden trailers and metal containers and converted UPS trucks. We had no grid electricity, but we rented a room in the neighboring parking garage where there was a water faucet (for drinking water), a couple of plugs (where cell phones and lap tops often lay piled and charging), and two washing machines.
All the permanent residents had solar panels to illuminate their nights and power their stereos, but the guest wagon did not; I read by candle light and had a headlamp. I listened to cassette tapes on a battery-powered Walkman/dictation device. Kinski Reads Villon and an Unfinished Business mix tape in steady rotation.
Peeing you did outside, or maybe in the structure next to the pub building (an out house with a pebble- and sand-lined floor). Groups of people had compost toilets that they shared, and others walked across the street and used the bathroom attached the the building supply store for the after-coffee bathroom visit.
The trailer was small—probably about four meters by 2 meters 30—and a bit rugged, but it was easy to fall for. A small counter top for preparing food (though I used the kitchen trailer for my cooking), a wood stove, some shelves, and a chair/step. The lofted bed was like a second room, and the ceiling above it could be opened on hinges to let in the sun and the air. Nights in bed beneath a mosquito net, days on a chair positioned in the sun.
I’ve been feeling archival today, and, thinking of the people who stumble upon this website from time to time without ever having heard the word wagenplatz or any of my diy trailer (I’m trying to wean myself off using the word “wagon” all the time in English texts) renovation yarns, I thought I would compile an index of the whole story, from start to finish.
So if you like stories about building stuff from trash; tales of diy renovation trial, tribulation, and trivia; and dumpster-scavenged booty, here it is at last: The Complete Story of Trash House in a whole bunch of parts.
If you’ve been reading Click Clack Gorilla since the beginning, then, well, just imagine this is one of those tediously earnest “year in review” posts, ignore it, and we’ll go get a beer together while the newcomers get all caught up.
2009
July 9: The wagon moves July 17: I rip up the carpeting and discover the wood floor July 27: I discover sponge mold lurking and hatch madcap plans July 31: Removing the mold, ripping off siding, and dumpster diving a trailer load of wood at the building supply store
August 14: A wasp’s nest, a mouse’s nest and two tiny bottles of Jägermeister August 21: Wherein my guardian construction angel expresses doubt and I find a lot of absurdly large Styrofoam blocks August 28: Wherein I briefly abandon the project in order to give a tall bike-building workshop in Cologne
September 23: Wherein I rip off more siding and start insulating the walls September 26: Wherein all hope is almost lost and the trash cheers me up
October 2: And the quest stands upon the edge of a knife October 13: Terrified by the approaching winter, I finish almost all of the insulating and re-siding
March 1: Frankenshed is born (aka scavenged materials + one day = two storage sheds) April 2: I build a trap door into the floor that opens into a hidden storage compartment April 9: Wherein I finally close up the hole in the wall where I cut out the mold April 20: We move the half-finished colossus to a new spot and victory is briefly mine April 21: Finally building stairs to get me in the front door
May 17: Wherein a realign my priorities and get focused May 31: Magpie visits and takes some pictures of our community
July 14: I decide to insulate the ceiling with hemp mats July 16: Insulating the ceiling July 17: Finishing off the ceiling July 26: Sanding down the floor and the first before and after pictures
August 16: A run down of costs (and move-in chaos)
*Elevator music plays while the Beard and I escape to my native shores for two months.*
November 20: Wagon vocabulary and a beautiful shed November 29: Replacing window glass and the first snow November 30: Prelude to a tour (braggin’ photos)
December 1: Holy shit, it’s finished December 2: Recycling for the apocalypse (re-inventing scavenged objects)
And a new age dawns, dramatic music swells, and I run off laughing into the sunset.
I heart tiny houses. So you can imagine my surprise and exhilaration when I discovered that there are heaps of people out there who also love small dwellings, and not just the wägler.* People who are building bizarre-o, beautiful, unique little houses, and people who are blogging about them all over the internet. So many and so much so, that I’ve heard it called “the tiny house movement.” High fives for everyone!
Today This Tiny House featured my wagon project on their blog. If you’ve been a long-time Gorilla reader, you’ll probably recognize the pictures, but the whole thing is really charmingly put together, and I’m six shades of flattered to be featured there among some seriously gorgeous small-house porn. Mmmm. You should really visit their site and click through some of the incredible structures featured there. Like Handmade Rolling Homes (SWOON) and SunRay’s Gypsy Wagon (click here to see some of his other amazing work).
*Wägler is German for “people who live in the kind of trailer that I live in.”
Have I ever mentioned how excited I get when the internet—and specifically this blog—lead to interactions with real, live humans who send me words from their place in the real world? Well, if I haven’t, imagine me hopping and clapping and singing and doing cartwheels, because that’s how internet-born realities make me feel. As much as the internet can be soul-sucking and alienating and bad for our eyes, sometimes it actually does manage to bring people together and foster communication, the way I imagine it was intended to do. I like it when that happens. It seems hopeful. Hip hip hooray, etc.
It’s submissions for the “dumpster find of the week” series that have me all a’twitch. So without further clapping or slobbering or cartwheeling, here’s our first reader-contribution. If you’d like to send me some pictures and words for “dumpster find of the week,” then you’ll find instructions on how to do so at the bottom of this post.
These pictures come from John, who dumpster dives in Montreal, Canada. I am always curious to hear about variations on the dumpster-dived life, and John told me a little bit about his: “I live in a communal house with four awesome roommates and one grouchy but adorable kitty cat. We have a pretty thriving little community of friends and neighbors who are all into varying degrees of dumpster diving, DIY, vermicomposting, urban guerilla gardening, and so on. I’ve been dumpstering for about 6 years now, originally for things like clothes and kitchen utensils, furniture etc…Then for food…I’ve been living almost exclusively off of dumpstered goodies since July, with a small interruption while I went traveling for a few weeks in August-September (on tour with my band, the logistics made more than a little bit of dumpstering fairly impossible).”
And here’s what he told me about the origins of these lovelies in the photo: “We find things at one great dumpster which is a bulk wholesaler sort of place, selling things by the crate to restaurants and bars. One day we went as usual, and as we approached, we saw a guy biking away with a full case of (full!) wine bottles. It turned out the dumpster was full of wine! This is the sort of place that will throw out a case of 12 bottles because one broke and leaked over the rest of them. Happy day for us! We ended up with around 25 boxes and bottles of wine of various kinds and sizes. It made for two very happy potlucks with friends.”
Hells. Yeah. Can you say dumpster envy? I have only dumpster dived alcohol twice in my life. The first time I found of box containing a bottle of vodka and various bottles of red wine that seemed to say: “I’ve given up drinking and decided that I need to cement this decision by throwing away all the alcohol in the house.” The second alcohol find was in a supermarket dumpster and involved about 40 cans of champagne. I didn’t drink any of it, but my friends told me that the hangovers that followed were glorious.
But even the wine, prized dumpster find as it may be, isn’t the best find they’ve had. “Someone wrote a little informal survey there asking ‘What is the best thing you found in a dumpster in 2010?’,” John told me. “The overwhelming winner so far appears to be ‘new friends.’”
Submissions for “dumpster find of the week”
I’m always looking for more submissions for dumpster show and tell. If you’ve got some sweet dumpster booty you’d like to share, then take some pictures and send ‘em to nicolettekyle (at) yahoo (dot) com with some words about where and how you found the stuff in the picture and what you’re going to do with it. And for safety’s sake, better put “dumpster find of the week” in the subject line.
Tell me a little bit about yourself if you’d like (I’ll keep things as anonymous or blatant as you indicate I should). Tell me about your first time diving, your favorite dumpster, or anything else that seems appropriate at the time. I’ll take your emails and your photos and turn them into a blog post that will show up here, one each Wednesday until one of us stops caring.
Submitting your photos and words to me indicates that you have legal rights to said pictures and words, and that you are giving me legal permission to post your pictures and quote your words on Click Clack Gorilla. If you don’t hear back from me within a week, it means the internet ate your mail and you should try again.
So in the words of the esteemed Dolly Freed: “It’s feasible. It’s easy. It can be done. It should be done. Do it.” Even if we all live too far apart to share our dumpster finds with each other, we can at least ogle each other’s pictures on the internet.
Who knew there were children’s books about dumpster diving? Well, amazon.com did, and when I was browsing other trash books last summer, their mind reader recommendation robots suggested that I take a look at The Dumpster Diver by Janet S. Wong. Expecting (fearing) a treatise on diving much like what I’m working on this very second, I was surprised and pleased to find out that it’s an adorable story for those still knee high.
The book itself is large, colorful, and priced far too heftily for most dumpster-diver’s budget’s at $16.99. But the story is lovely, and I think any author who can convince a publishing company to print a book about Steve, the friendly neighborhood dumpster diver deserves my support (or that of your local library, who will probably order the library a copy if you fill out a request form).
The plot revolves around a hobby dumpster diver (Steve) who likes to check out the neighborhood trash with a few local kids. Together Steve and the kids build neat stuff out of the junk that Steve fishes out of the trash, the crotchety old lady next door calls Steve lazy and no-good for diving instead of working more so he can buy new things, and, in a strangely negative turn of events, Steve gets hurt when a trash pile collapses on him while he’s crawling around one of the dumpsters.
But, everyone lives happily ever after after all, the kids decide to collect their neighbors useful junk before they throw it away, and they build Steve a wheelchair out of their dumpster booty. Cute story for burgeoning dumpster divers and great copy-cut-and-paste flier material for freegan events.
And remember, if you decide to buy this book and do it by clicking through this link, I get hot cash! Well, ok, it’s more like cold pennies, but hey, they add up too.
When I woke up it was still dark, and I had to pee. Usually this happens around 5 am, but the room was warm like it is at 2 am. I put a hand on the wood stove on my way past it and out the door, but it was cold. Strange, I thought: when the wagon is this temperature in the night, the wood stove is usually still luke warm. But it was cold, and my clock said that it was 7:30 am.* The ice had thawed and an uncannily timed preview of spring has arrived.
It’s gray and rainy most days, but it’s warm enough to brush your teeth outside in boots, underwear, and a sweater. It’s warm enough that an hour of fire in the wood stove is enough to keep things pleasant for most of the day. It’s warm enough for dresses and one pair of stockings, pants without long underwear, bare heads, glove-less hands. It is a time of rubber boots and of mud.
I worry that my tulips will wake up and then freeze to death in the inevitable cold spell still to come. I hope the mosquitoes wake up prematurely and bite it. But mostly, I take deep breaths of the damp air and am glad for the respite from wood stove vigilance and five-layer outfits. Are we in the eye of the storm? Will winter fall upon us again next week in a foot-high blanket of snow? But at least this intermission will have given us the deep breath we needed before the next plunge, and I’m already finding myself looking forward to more wood-stove-top soup cooking.
A year ago Saturday, the Beard and I got hitched in the most ridiculous costume party/shopping cart chariot race/wedding ceremony I have ever attended. Now just two years remain until the German government issues me a visa for forever, and to celebrate the sun shone for the first time in months and presented us with badly needed bundles of vitamin d.
*Tragically, it doesn’t get light here on winter mornings until sometime between 8 and 9 am, which makes getting out of bed early even more of a challenge then it already it.
Holy fucking shit, it’s Dumpster Diver the musical! I knew there was a lot of dumpster-diving-related media out there, but I never imagined that it was theme that would make it to the realm of musical theater. Ha! Seems that the time has come for This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb to give up their monopoly in my heart in the area of dumpster-diving related songs.
Though I haven’t been able to find mention of any actual performances, the Dumpster Diver the Musical website has a synopsis of the plot that sounds pretty apetizing as far as plots go:
“What if everything you had believed in was based on a lie? What if the company you were working for had evil intentions that they advertised as necessary for security? What if you were given the opportunity to expose the truth? When confronted by an old college friend with the truth about his company, Trevor has a decision to make. Will he continue working and living a comfortable life, or will he risk everything to tell the truth, and in doing so, find adventure? Discover what happens in this new musical about friendship, adventure, and dumpster diving.”
I’d be willing to bet some really awesome crusty anarcho folks are behind this, and hopefully they’ll write me back and let me interview them so that I can find out and tell you all about it. Until then, you can sing along to their cheesily poppy and adorable ode to some trash pickin’ fun, “I feel aliver (now that I’m a dumpster diver).” I think a round of high fives are in order.
Do you know any other songs about dumpster diving? I’d love to compile a dumpster mix tape track list. I can only come up with two off the top of my head: This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb // Of Chivalry and Romance in a Dumpster, Madeline Adams // Dumpster Dive Mother (though I’m not sure that song actually has much to do with dumpster diving). Leave me more in the comments (with links to places where I can hear ‘em if possible). Perhaps the time has come for Click Clack Gorilla: The Mix Tape.
I wake up early, and the room is cold, my breath visible. I burrow deeper into the mound of down blankets under which I’ve been sleeping, press my eyes together tightly, then spring up all at once, like a winter swimmer holding her breath before plunging into an icy lake.
I hurry into socks and shirts and pants and shoes; the quicker that I am gone, the sooner that I will be sitting warm inside the bus that will carry me to the train station. I glance in the mirror before throwing on coat and backpack. Outside I brush my teeth with a blue toothbrush and a water bottle, and I spit white on white on the frozen ground outside the door.
The bus takes me to a train takes me to a train takes me to Frankfurt. An hour after leaving home I emerge from the book I have been reading and walk through two sets of glass doors and into the publishing company where I write two days a week. A plastic card gets me past the stainless steel turnstile at reception.
At lunch, where I fill my plate from the salad bar like I will never eat again, I see my hand beside that of a colleague and I almost laugh out loud. I wonder if they have noticed the dirt on my knuckles and beneath my nails. If they have, it doesn’t bother them. When I was hired I had a pink dread mullet, and I am not in customer service.
The entire day is spent researching stories on the internet and maintaining a website. The more time that I spend on the internet, the longer it takes me to leave. It is an either/or situation. I can spend two months away, estranged and freaked-out by the brief computer contact I do have, and then in a rush and a whirl and an intoxicating spin I can find myself back in the thick of it, thinking about it long after the screen has been turned off, suddenly invested in comments and statuses and rss feeds. Every day it takes longer and longer to come home.
And so on the days when I don’t work, when the crowded train has carried me home for the last time each week, I breath a loud sigh of relief, chop some wood, finish a book, and more or less ignore the internet for the five days I have between “workends.” Hell, if it’s not anything else (and it is many things), it’s two days’ saved firewood.
Found in the metal bin at the university trash corral. If I was motivated enough, I could probably make a decent living harvesting and selling all the scrap metal that lands in that bin. That same day I found a ton of other less photogenic but highly useful goodies: lighters, candles, pencils, and a metal hip flask.
What have you found in the trash recently?
It’s time for show and tell. I want to hear about what you’ve found in the trash. In fact, I want to make this whole “dumpster find of the week” post into a forum where we all get to brag about our dumpster booty while secretly weeping over hearts broken by the wastefulness of this, our time and place, and I want to do it together here on this blog.
So my lovelies, this means you! I know that some of you are long-time divers and that some of you are probably curious about giving that old trash pickin’ a try. In the words of the esteemed Dolly Freed: “It’s feasible. It’s easy. It can be done. It should be done. Do it.” Get out there and try your hand at dumpster diving. Take a look around your place. Take some pictures of your dumpster booty, and send ‘em to nicolettekyle (at) yahoo (dot) com with some words about where and how you found the stuff in the picture and what you’re going to do with it. And for safety’s sake, better put “dumpster find of the week” in the subject line.
Tell me a little bit about yourself if you’d like (I’ll keep things as anonymous or blatant as you indicate I should). Tell me about your first time diving, your favorite dumpster, or anything else that seems appropriate at the time. I’ll take your emails and your photos and turn them into a blog post that will show up here, one each Wednesday until one of us stops caring.
Submitting your photos and words to me indicates that you have legal rights to said pictures and words, and that you are giving me legal permission to post your pictures and quote your words on Click Clack Gorilla. If you don’t hear back from me within a week, it means the internet ate your mail and you should try again. So! Get out there and start taking some trashy photos. I can’t wait to see what turns up. It’ll be a regular vicarious dumpster divers’ Christmas.
