Stig by the dump...?

[ColJack]

I was just perusing freecycle and a notion came to me..

our local tip ( civic ameneties site ) has a carpark and a small woodland near it's approach..
with all of the stuff that gets thrown away I recon it would be possible to live quite comfortably in those woods or on that carpark if you started with a decent size tent..

people throw away all sorts.. bricks, bits of carpet, old floorboards, half tins of paint, half bags of cement, old 3 piece suites etc etc..
if you asked everyone who went there what they were dumping i recon that over a period of years you could probably make a small cottage and furnish it..

 

[Norcon]

A cottage like that would be a right tip.

 

[EdwardCurrent]

I reckon Norcon's talking rubbish.

Excellent idea Col.

We could do a 'self build' type project with members of DIYnot offering 'free labour'.
From 'planning permission and building regs' at the start, then 'core' trades, and finishing with the 'audio-visual' crew etc.

Then we could donate the dwelling to a 'needy' cause !!!

(I think it would end up a house made up of red tape and bloodstains ). (Brown tape for the Spark's)

Regards
Ed

 

[Richard C]

We do an extended house swap (family) to a Spanish urbanisation (rural suburb) every year. They have household refuse collection from communal bins EVERY day but there is also a large designated lay-bye with the usual recycling bins & where you can dump all sorts of stuff from Palm/Yucca tree cuttings, redundant concrete balustrades & building materials, furniture & practically anything you can think of. This gets cleared once a week but what’s amazing is that if you drive past in the morning & make a mental note of what’s there, when you come back in the afternoon, it’s all changed! What was there & of any use has gone to be replaced by other stuff & it will change again the next day until it's just the crap left & that gets cleared once a week by a big truck; & they will even leave anything that’s any good behind!

What a fantastic & visionary recycling system which works extremely well for everyone. Dump anything at the side of the road over here & it’s (rightly) classed as fly tipping but take it to the tip & you will be charged for the privilege & you will get prosecuted for stealing if you try to remove anything which might be of use to you. I can remember when you could remove stuff from council tips without any problem & even up until 18 months ago, I could appropriate something which was of use to me from our now privatised tip for a contribution to the tip “Christmas do”; but now that’s been banned by jobsworth.

My Spanish relative’s council tax is around £400 a year!

 

[conny]

I went to a recycling site last year and up ahead I saw some bloke 'dumping' a stand for a parasol sunshade, you know the cast iron type.
As I got to that spot there was a guy in a hi-viz stacking stuff neatly. Told him I'd seen a guy dump it 2 minutes previously and could I have it?
"Err, lets see."
Turns it around on its base, gives it a good look over then says,
"£15 mate."
"But I've just seen some fella dump it there."
"Council property now mate, can't go off site without a charge and a site pass."
"For get it."

Driving out I saw a bloke with a trailer and some garden equipment, rakes, spades, plastic patio chairs etc.
"Haven't got a cast iron parasol base there have you?" I laughed.
"Yes mate, do you want it?"
"Do I!"
Offered him a fiver but he wouldn't take anything, just glad to get shut of it.

 

[ladylola]

My father worked for the council at an incinerater plant which also doubled as a household waste site. I would often stay with him on a sunday shift and even to this day I'm amazed just how much good stuff was and still is dumped. We had bikes and lawnmowers coming out of our ears, clothes, furnature including antiques, tools and on and on. He even came home one day with a case of spirits, all unopened, that somebody had thrown away. My mother didn't know (or at least I don't think she did) but there was also a pile of porn mags around 5ft high.
When I started work I witnessed the waste endemic in the construction industry as well, bank jobs were particulary bad, perfectly good interiors only a few years old were skipped and time being so tight in these jobs that careful dismantel was impossible and distruction was the order of the day.
So all in all I reckon the col is spot on.

 

[Thermo]

it amazes me the stuff people throw out when we clear gardens. its an absolute tradgedy to see what gets skipped. Ive often thought that you could make a business going around job sites picking up what the builders dont want and selling it on.

 

[ColJack]

tommy walsh did a program like that..
had one guy doing all the forraging in skips and calling round builders and so on and he made some cracking finds..

one place was a bathroom place and they had skips full of baths and sinks etc that they had taken out when doing a refit and they just skipped the lot because it wasn't cost effective to sort trough it..
nearly new stuff and all sorts..

then there's the building site clearances.. if they have a couple of pallets of blocks or bricks left over at the end of the job then they just skip them as transport to the next site, or storage for future use would cost more than buying new..

the amount of skirting and quadrant and architrave my dad has in the garage and shed is just silly..
they order "trim packs" for houses and they get delivered in a bundle for each house.. often there's leftovers from the previous house that will fit the next one so they end up with bundles left over where they've used the "scrap" from the other houses..

window companies are great places to tap up for free stuff too..
they quite often make custom windows and doors only for the customer to change their mind or to find that the measurements were out etc, so they have frames just lying about at the factory.. if you're building from scratch then you can plan and build to accomodate any size..

 

[imamartian]

Quite a few years ago, i bought a new build house.... and every night i got home from work, the site foreman agreed i could forage for timber in their skips.... i must've got £'s and £'s worth of decent 'offcuts'.

But what annoys me, is at our local tip they use to sell things to you... but recently, you're not allowed to buy anything. So you want an old bike for a tenner... well they have to 'recycle' it first !!!!! bizarre !!

 

[joe-90]

I'd love to be able to find a place for this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120554060314&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

 

[heatingman]

just erected a sodding log cabin at bottom of garden, that would have been perfect at a fraction of cost, don't ask! women you have to love them.

 

[Richard C]

Joe, I guarantee somebody would "escape" that very quickly, even without the trailer & I would be very surprised to see it in our urbanisation lay-by much after lunch time; but it’s free

Are you rally tying to flog that?

 

[conny]

Think he was infering he would like a place in his garden to put it rather than he was the seller.

 

[nickso]

We do an extended house swap (family) to a Spanish urbanisation (rural suburb) every year. They have household refuse collection from communal bins EVERY day but there is also a large designated lay-bye with the usual recycling bins & where you can dump all sorts of stuff from Palm/Yucca tree cuttings, redundant concrete balustrades & building materials, furniture & practically anything you can think of. This gets cleared once a week but what’s amazing is that if you drive past in the morning & make a mental note of what’s there, when you come back in the afternoon, it’s all changed! What was there & of any use has gone to be replaced by other stuff & it will change again the next day until it's just the crap left & that gets cleared once a week by a big truck; & they will even leave anything that’s any good behind!

thats great, i would be down there everyday.

our local tip is run by a waste firm on behalf of the council. all the employees drive box vans to work and must be making a mint selling the good stuff in the small ads.

 

[Richard C]

Think he was infering he would like a place in his garden to put it rather than he was the seller.

Shame, I would have taken it off his hands for a couple of hundred less & as it would then be about the same price as the new shed I'm looking at buying