I had been dreaming of a new terrace for months. One slightly bigger than what I had fronting my abode—with a roof and an outdoor sink for washing hands and doing dishes out in the green during the warmer months. I had it mentally planned out to the last detail, but I needed to wait. No need to build it before we moved my Wagen to it’s new spot. I am not very good at waiting.
But, as always happens with time passing and waiting, the day arrived at long last. We moved my Wagen. We put my old terrace/steps construction (wow, remember when I built that? feels like a hundred years ago, which apparently translates to “about a year and a half”) in front of our sleeping Wagen to replace the wobbly pile of stumps that had served as steps before. They had gotten dangerous. I had fallen off them twice, which is not fun at the best of times and is really upsetting when your body is pumping with prego hormones and you were running out the door to throw up.
Once my Wagen was in its new spot and propped up off its wheels courtesy of the lovely Frau Doktor, I was itching to build my terrace. I had a big pallet, and scrap wood left from a dumpster diving excursion at the building supply store. But I couldn’t actually lift the pallet or bend down to screw on the leg supports. (This is the kind of thing I mean when I say things like “and pregnancy has rendered me pretty useless, physically.”) I needed help. I don’t particularly like asking for help—for weeks I used a chair as a temporary step instead—but when I finally did, two of my buddies agreed to do the job. So while I ran around fetching tools and screws, they put together this sweet little number for me. Aren’t they awesome? I feel lucky to have friends who will build me a terrace while I haul this baby and its water cave around in my abdomen.
So: the project:
First they put four leg supports on the pallet (which was a bit complicated on the right side because of the mini hill there). But the pallet was a little unsteady, so they screwed a flat peice of wood on top of it to add more stability. All the wood was dumpster dived.
Messing with the height of the support legs:
The “can it hold a human adult or is it about to break” test (preceded by the “will it break if I dance on it test”):
And the finished project, complete with lucky black cat:
It’s not entirely finished—as you can see there is no roof (well, not one big enough to cover the whole thing) and no outdoor sink. But those can wait for spring when I have my body back to myself and I can lug another pallet home to extend the terrace further in the direction of our sleeping Wagen (making the path between our two Wagens shorter), put on a bigger roof, and install the outdoor sink.
In our little community we go without a lot of things that the majority of folks in the western world consider standard. Running water in our kitchens. Bathrooms attached to our main living spaces. Dial-controlled, low-maintenance heating systems. Doing without these things makes our particular community possible, and I rarely miss them. But every once in a while, I’ll get a well-it-certainly-would-be-more-convenient-for-my-lazy-ass-right-now pang. The only thing I’ve never missed is having a dryer.
Line drying is awesome. In the summer you’ve got as much space as you’ve got yard, with the added bonus that the sun will bleach your whites and, allegedly, disinfect really gross, dirty travel punks’ socks. Problem with line drying when you live in a tiny house is that in the winter, you don’t have the space. Sure, you might be able to squeeze one rack (usually fits exactly one machine full) in somewhere, but you’ll spend the next couple of days tripping over it and cursing its space-hogging presence in your little abode. With massive amounts of baby laundry on the horizon (we’re cloth diapering, in case you hadn’t heard), the problem of drying space was becoming more urgent.
As we have a house on the front of our community’s property, we all can sometimes set up our drying racks in the house—but only during semester breaks when the vokü (vokü=cheap, volunteer-run, vegan or vegetarian cafe, like Food Not Bombs with less dumpster diving) isn’t running. The garage/addition area is usually up for grabs too, though it is a pretty musty area and your laundry will end up outside, rain or shine, if you forget to move it before the next scheduled concert. And since sometimes people smoke in both of those places, neither make for a good baby-wash-drying solution.
So the Beard grabbed two old sides of a wooden baby crib that I had dumpster dived years before and been planning to use as kindling, added hinges, screwed them to our ceiling right above the wood stove, and solved the problem in a matter of minutes. Wha-la:
Two loads of laundry fit on them, and the hinges allow them to swing down just far enough so that I can reach them. The best part is that their position over the wood stove means that our laundry drys in a matter of hours instead of the days it sometimes takes in the sometimes-damp, never that warm garage area. Dumpster-dived baby bed turns into tiny house laundry rack. Yes and yes.
Are you dryer free? How do you deal with line-drying during the winter months?
One of my pals prefers to heat with wood briquettes (as opposed to wood). So she usually orders a little bit of fire wood, and a whole lot of wood briquettes. But this year she didn’t order quite enough fire wood. So she did what all of us really should be doing all year long: she drove the tractor to the big university trash corral, brought home a huge load of pallets, sawed them into tiny pieces, built a shed out of some scavenged stuff she had around, and filled it up with sawed pallet bits. Free heat! I spent most of the summer fantasizing about doing just that. But now I can’t lift a pallet onto the table saw, so I guess I’ll be waiting until next year. And giving my friend high fives. Here are some photos of her pretty little trash shed:
The important thing to remember when dumpster diving rain barrels is that you need to know what was in them in their former life. Because if their former contents were poisonous, then you don’t want to be using them to collect water for your garden in, no siree. So in the case of rain barrels, it’s good if you have a connection at the trash depot. We do, and he (high fives for you awesome trash guy) sometimes puts barrels aside for us when he knows that the contents were harmless. Some of these came from him, and some of them used to be other people’s rain barrels. Who knows why they tossed them. But who knows why people toss a lot of things.
Have you scavenged anything good lately?
Read about why I do a “dumpster find of the week” series here. Or check out some of the other treasures I’ve pulled out of the trash here.
Then one awesome lady surprised me with by sending a long winter jacket she didn’t need anymore in the mail. A few days later I found a second jacket, the one I am wearing in the rather too dark picture above, in the trash across the street to boot (to jacket!). The gifted jacket may or may not fit until month nine, but if it doesn’t this jacket is big enough for both the Beard and I to wear at the same time. And it’s really warm. And it’s lined with fleece. And it’s not a hideous color. And once Peanut is here she’ll fit in the carrier under the jacket as well. As usual, three cheers for the trash!
Read about why I do a “dumpster find of the week” series here. Or check out some of the other treasures I’ve pulled out of the trash here.
Heh. Just discovered this little ditty about a romance that ends prematurely once the lady discovers her new duder is a garbage picker. Great story. Great punchline. Someday I will make a dumpster diving themed mix tape and this will be on it.
I always feel extra great when I can intercept a useful item before it lands in the dumpster. I dream of a world where grocers put out all of their throw-away food for people to take home with them. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? A world with fewer dumpsters and more free boxes? Yes, yes it would. *Eyes glaze over with daydream juice.* And now let’s get back to the real world, where unthinkable amounts of edibles are tossed every single day and grocers defend their edible trash with padlocks and legal charges.
I’ve been anxious to get back to dumpster diving lately—it’s been a good six months since I’ve been out (and it’s been a good six months since I’ve been pregnant, no coincidence there). And now I find myself wondering if I’m even going to be able to fit between the space between roof and fence at my favorite spot with this beach ball beneath my ribs. Let alone whether I’ll have the balance to climb a fence at all, or the energy to stay up past ten pm. So instead of pining for dumpster booty this week, I got back into an old habit and a great way for folks a bit too wary to root through any trash but in need of free eats: I went to the farmers’ market and asked around for leftovers.
If you’re the shy type, you might feel a little nervous about doing this at first, but usually the folks behind farmers’ market stands are kind and friendly. At this point I know which stands give and which stands don’t, but when you get started, you just walk around asking if that stand has any discards that they would be willing to give away. Of course many people say no, but no one has ever been rude. Beggars at farmers’ markets are standard, and you certainly won’t be the first person that has ever asked them for leftovers. Though a lot of stands don’t give—many feed their extras to their livestock—enough always do to keep us in produce for at least a week. As you can see from the picture above.
I posted the first “dumpster find of the week” blog in March of last year. What started as a post to show off a mother load of old wooden boxes that we had found (that I later turned into Frankenshed) became the (almost) weekly series that you know, and maybe even love.
But why bother? Why parade random objects before your eyes on a weekly basis? I’ve never stopped to explain the whys and wherefores, and I thought, well, no time like the present. With all this parading of objects, it seemed like it might be easy to get the wrong idea, the idea that this whole dumpster diving thing is more about materialism than anything else. And it is about objects in so far as dumpsters are full of objects that can help you out. But! Lo! It is so much more.
I show you pictures of dumpster dived objects every week because I want you to know what it is possible to find in the trash. I want you—whoever you are, however you live, and whatever you do with your time—to know that almost everything you need can be obtained without money. I want you to know that the silver lining to the dark cloud of living in an incredibly wasteful time and place is that you can feed yourself, clothe yourself, and shelter yourself by dumpster diving and scavenging, that even if society has disowned you or pushed you right over the edge you can live like a queen on the scraps.
I want you to know that you could work less if you satisfied some of your material needs and desires through objects scavenged rather than purchased. And I really, really want everyone to know that dumpster diving and trash picking are nothing to ever be ashamed about or embarassed of. Don’t wrinkle your nose at the lady rooting through the trash. That lady is you in another set of circumstances.
One of my favorite quotes on the subject of dumpster diving comes from the CrimethInc book Recipes for Disaster. “Burdens lift and scarcity is averted when the mountains of trash produced by this insane society become supplies and sustenance. Everything that sucks about capitalism is inverted when the dumpster diver scores. Poverty becomes abundance. Loss becomes gain. Despair becomes hope.” Glory glory hallelujah.
I’ve been cleaning out my shed to make room for the baby carriage—until now parked in a spot where it wasn’t completely covered and was getting hit with leaves and the occasional rain and bird poop—which has meant I’ve been carting things over to the trash across the street. Most of it was stuff I’d gotten there in the first place and, despite my best efforts, hadn’t ultimately found a use for: a rather ugly cabinet, a beautiful wooden box/potential cabinet that I never managed to get open, some stray styrofoam I didn’t end up needing for the insulation.
Last night on my very last trash run I found this:
At first I had been thinking that we wouldn’t really need a car seat. After all we don’t own a vehicle, and we rarely ride in cars. But, then I realized, duh, Black Diamond tour. Because the next time we go on tour little Peanut will be coming with us (along with someone to babysit while we’re on stage). So now that we have the car seat, any one want to give us their seven-seater van?!
And while we’re talking about dumpster-dived kids’ stuff… Almost six months ago I also found this stroller (pictured below), which will be a nice light-weight alternative to the transformer warrier (the thing can fold into so many different shapes it’s ridiculous) carriage that will be Peanut’s main ride.
Just kidding. Owning a vacuum cleaner has nothing to do with being conservative. But since a lot of folks we know like to make jokes about the inevitable journey to squareness that is expected to occur when you get married/have a kid/pass any other coming of age water mark, when the Beard mentioned that we should probably buy a vacuum cleaner before Peanut arrived, he made the obvious joke.
There is little need for a vacuum cleaner in a tiny house with no wall-to-wall rugs. There is plenty of dust, thanks to the wood stove and the constant traffic between outdoors and in, but we sweep, I wash my floor (which I sealed with yacht sealant just for this purpose) with hot water and vinegar once in a while, and I beat out my two throw rugs with a woven wicker carpet beater. But vacuums do manage to do the job more thoroughly, and as is the way of these things, we waited and waited, and eventually a vacuum showed up in the trash across the street. Thanks dumpster gods.
