Middle of the night Scavangers!

I am laughing to myself this morning!

Yesterday I was doing some clean-up in the courtyard. When we bought our villa there was a glass patio table and 4 chairs out on the patio. Nothing really like my taste but serviceable so I was going to keep the set. Then, whenever we sat in one of the chairs the fabric would start to split ! At first I thought, OMG, I REALLY need to lose some weight ~ but, actually, the fabric was just rotted from sitting in the sun and rain for years.

So, I checked out having them re-done. Well, they want $53 each for the fabric and then there's another charge to have the material thread through the frames and reinstalled.....probably a good $300 or more for the 4 chairs......TOO expensive for old chairs that also need the frames repainted.

I put the chairs out by the trash pickup yesterday. One of the neighbors said the trash people would take them. Whoops ~ not until Friday when they take the recycles! When they were still there after the trash truck went by, instead of carrying them back into the garage, I just left them sitting on the driveway.

I just glanced out there and 3 of the 4 chairs are gone.

It would be nice if someone has the talent and desire to recycle the chairs. But I'm laughing to myself because I know as soon as someone tries to sit in them the fabric is going to let go altogether! Maybe I should have been nice and put the table out, too. But there's nothing wrong with the table except the frame needs to be repainted....the glass is still good and I'm sure it will look just fine with some other sturdier chairs.

Too FUNNY !

I guess I should just thank my lucky star I didn't get an exchange of equally or worse objects for my junque!

bethk wrote:Too FUNNY !

I guess I should just thank my lucky star I didn't get an exchange of equally or worse objects for my junque!

 
Yeah!... and it's amazing how I sometimes will put something out good, and put a sign Free on it. Well it must be night time for them to take it. It's very rare they will come and take during the day!
 
Not Tina. When the town has cleanup, she's out there in her jeans with her friend scrounging through junk, and she just loads it in the trunk and brings it back here. The last thing she came home with, was an old home made potato and onion bin box with rusty old hinges, and a decal of carrots and potatoes on the lid. It still sits in the garage. There is NO ROOM to put it in the kitchen!

I've stopped doing stuff like that. It cost me too much to get rid of all that trash we had collected over the years.

Dane is my resident pack rat. He'll take anything offered, figuring it will have a use "someday". He never stopped to pick out trash at the street but would take anything someone said they were tossing. I cannot tell you how much scrap wood we had to drag out of one of the garages to put near the bonfire pile. But at least here in the villa there is no place to store stuff so that won't happen......

I hope!

People do the same thing here.  Anything I didn't want that was still good, I used to put out near the curb on that little piece of land between the sidewalk and the street.  I called it my "boo spot" (after Boo Radley in "To Kill A Mockingbird").  If it was something that operates, I'd put a sign on it something like "still works, just ugly" and it would usually be gone within an hour.  

I used to do this when we lived in Uptown N.O. and still do it where we live now.  Brian sends me flowers all the time so I always seem to have tons of inexpensive glass vases the florist uses -- when I get too many, I put a box out with the ones I'm clearing out.  I once put a computer out (an old 8088, I'm sure some of you are old enough to know this old computer, prior to a 286) along with a printer and a man just stood over it for ages.  A friend of his walked by and he told him he was just waiting for someone he knew to drive by, as it was too much to carry home.  He and the stuff were gone in another hour!  

A neighbor -- a medical resident -- put out a bunch of medical textbooks one time in the place he had seen me putting things.  He had Brian and I in hysterics, as he told us the bunch of old merchant seaman who lived across the street and puffed on joints all day long had picked up the books.  We were killing ourselves laughing watching them all paging thru the books. You just never know!

One time living here I put out a really awful bottle of wine someone had given me. The nextdoor neighbor rang the bell and returned it, thinking that we'd forgotten it outside while unloading groceries. I told her she could have it and a couple days later, she rang the bell and gave me a bottle of wine she had. I had to laugh, as I couldn't put that one out, too, or she'd have seen it.