Sheets and blankets and towels don’t make for good headlines.  But from them I built my comfy sleeping nest (well, not the towels), and my comfy sleeping nest is pretty much the most important place in my little house.  Because we live so tiny (our main dwelling being 7 meters by 2,20 meters for those of you just tuning in), our bed tends to serve as both bed, couch, and living room.  When I’m inside, I’m usually hanging out on the bed.

I’ve written about the bed in my Wagen before, about how I built it out of dumpstered materials, got a mattress from a friend, and then clothed it in dumpster-dived pillows, sheets, and blankets.  And the bed in our main Wagen is pretty much the same deal.  Though the main frame was in it when we moved in, the extension that we added to make it huge (so Baby Pickles could sleep in it with us) was largely dumpstered and the mattress extension was cut out of a bit of foam headed for the trash.

Though I haven’t been checking the trash across the street so often for booty (and the university changed the type of trash cans there, which makes for slightly more work for the diver), I still managed to find one of the recurrent “bed bundles” this season.  What is a bed bundle?  Well, it’s when a student, for no reason I can ascertain, takes the fitted sheet off of their bed, wraps all of the rest of their bed clothes in it (blankets pillows etc) and then tosses it as-is in the trash.  It blows my mind every time I find one, and over the years I’ve found quite a few, and it is the reason that all (with three exceptions, one from a flea market and two old fitted sheets from my mom) of my sheets, the sheets (and towels) that you see in that photo, are from the trash.

As usual, thanks to the wasteful students!  (But really?)  How ironic (is this actual irony?  I have never bothered to really hammer the true definition of that word into my head) that I profit from the same waste that frustrates me so.  Oh those twisted webs.

And you thought I hated that color. Well, I do. But when I went out to take out the trash and found this baby tub and (umm, what do you call these things? ummm…) toilet trainer seat thingy, I shrugged and took them home. There are a number of baby tubs lying around the Wagenplatz that would have worked just fine as well, though many of them were a little on the big side, and none of them had a drain plug in the bottom. (Note to self: do not get cocky and use inside the trailer where it is bound to somehow come open and flood everything.)

What have you found in the trash recently?

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.

I’ve posted this picture before, but when I came across it in my blog archives I thought: now there’s a story worth telling twice. So here goes. Once upon a time I took a long Sunday bike ride through some nearby fields. Those nearby fields are also near some big box stores. I had never checked out their dumpsters, so I biked behind them, finding nothing until I came to a huge high-security fenced in trash area. This is what was inside, and for a good thirty seconds, I actually thought it might be real.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen in the trash?

Did I get this from Sperrmüll (that’s German for “big trash left out on the curb”) in Frankfurt or in Mainz? I can’t remember now, but I remember being excited to find it. And it’s in perfect condition except one tiny wooden bit that’s been broken off—probably the reason it was tossed in the first place. Well PISHAW. We know how to fix broken little wooden bits, and because we’re willing to do so, we now have a sweet old-school sled. Though I do remember the plastic saucer sleds being more unpredictable and speedy, which is always a plus when you’re a little kid with a quick healing time.

Have you been sledding yet this year?

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.

“Welcome to the end of the world as we know it.  The advertised future has been canceled, due to unforseen circumstances.  All around us there are signs that our whole way of living is passing into histoy.  This is a book about what we do next.”

What could I say about this passage, about my excitment for the book that this statement graces the back of, that wouldn’t sound cliche, that could really communicate the excitment that I feel fluttering in the marrow of my bones at reading these words?  Nothing.  Silence, in fact, is the answer.  A quiet nod at what I can only imagine is a damn fine publication created by people who I would really enjoy sharing an evening with.  Meet the Dark Mountain Project.

Being hopelessly out of touch with everything—even things that interest me passionately—I first heard about the project over a year after the second Dark Mountain anthology was complete, from fellow sometimes-small-houser writer dreamer painter and dream weaver Rima Staines.  (Whose work you might remember from this post.)  The group publishes hardcover anthologies of end-of-civilization writing and art, puts on festivals, and generally deserves a lot of hat-tipping and praise.  As usual, they’ve already described the project well themselves, and I quote:

“We are citizens of the most destructive civilisation in human history. That civilisation is in the process of destroying much of life on Earth in order to feed its ever-advancing appetites. As it does so, it appears to be destroying itself.  All around us are signs that our whole way of life is passing into history.

“In times like these, an honest cultural response is needed. It is through stories that we weave reality. The progress of civilisation itself is a story; as is the centrality of homo sapiens to life on Earth, as is the inevitability of human life getting better, of technology and science digging us out of the hole we are in. These old, creaking stories are now killing us. We need new ones.

“The Dark Mountain Project exists to write them. We aim to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to reflect clearly and honestly on our place in the world. We call this process Uncivilisation.”

dark mountain and dumpster diving

In a roundabout way, it all comes back to dumpster diving.  Rima painted the cover for the first Dark Mountain Anthology.  On a piece of wood she found in the trash.  And another dumpster find of the week post was born.  Isn’t it purdy?

The “click clack” in Click Clack Gorilla was born of my love of typewriters, the sounds they make, the way typewritten words look on a piece of paper. While they don’t fit well with the writing processes I have developed via computer use (ie writing a bunch and then doing a hundred rounds of tiny edits that would involve endless retyping on a typewriter), I love to use them for letters, mix cd track lists, labels, and anything in need of a little personality and a pleasant font.

During my first year in Germany I bought an old typewriter at the flea market for way too much money/20 euros. I carried his big grey bones around for hours afterwards, and he even got a ride in a grocery cart with the rest of my week’s rations before being taken home to my little au pair room. I named him Herman, and I wrote a lot of letters on him before eventually selling him at another flea market last year for a few euros. By that time I’d accumulated six typewriters, all found nestled lonely among piles of trash waiting for pick up on the street. And since six typewriters is too many for a tiny little house, I got rid of all but one—a tiny beige number with a full ink ribbon and no broken keys.

Fast forward to December 2011. I took the train over to Wiesbaden to meet up with expat-blogger Frau Dietz for sushi. I was sitting at the bar watching little ships of sushi float past me on a tiny river when she arrived. “Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said. “I was standing in front of this typewriter that somebody left on the street trying to decide if I should take it home or not.” (For the sake of accuracy, she probably didn’t say that exactly, but she said something very like it.)

Then she showed me this picture. If I wasn’t pregnant and totally averse to walking further than I had to and/or carrying anything unnessecary while walking, I would have gone and gotten it right then and there. Despite the fact that I really don’t need to start another typewriter collection. Despite everything.

Frau Dietz contemplated taking it on the way home, we discussed the usefulness of some sort of online “awesome big trash looking for a home” mapping program, and our attention turned to sushi boats and expat gossip. She didn’t end up taking it, so I guess we’ll never know if it found a good home or landed among the refuse. I like to think it’s sitting on the desk of someone’s attic apartment right now, clacking away.

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.

This post was featured on Farmgirl Friday at Dandelion House.

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?

This post was featured on Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways 9 at Frugally Sustainable, Simple Lives Thursday at gnowfglins, DIY Thrifty Thursday at Thrifty 101, Homestead Barn Hop at The Prairie Homestead, Frugal Tuesday Tip at Learning the Frugal Life, and 2nd Time Around on A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

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.