My Dumpster Castle

Dumpster Castles

In this business, you need just a few things: a dream, a step ladder, a few unlocked dumpsters, and occasionally, a middle finger.

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Every fall I wear the most lovely, colorful, fringed scarf—it works well with a variety of outfits and never fails to win compliments. The remarkable beauty of that scarf is matched only by the astonishment on people’s faces when I tell them it came from the dumpster at my kids’ school. The scarf was just one of an assortment of fashionable clothes and accessories--tops, pants, belts, shoes, and purses—folded and laid into boxes that had previously held cotton batting, with the name Jenna scrawled on the side in purple ink, and piled neatly in the elementary school garbage bin. I saved loads of money on back to school clothes for my oldest daughter, and enjoyed a few additions to my own closet, thanks to Jenna’s discarded wardrobe.

Speaking of accessories, I should also mention that I love jewelry—always have—and these days I have a sizable, eclectic array of baubles thanks to my forays into other people’s consumer waste or yard sale leftovers. I save a particularly eye-catching piece of gold-tone costume jewelry for special occasions. It is a hummingbird pin, with red jewel eyes, from the 1960’s, and rather collectible. I remember the day I found it, laying at the bottom of a big blue dumpster, next to the odd sticky milk carton and rotting apple core. I wear that pin proudly around Thanksgiving and Christmas—it’s gold sheen seems fitting amid the luster and excess of the holidays. Also among my collection, are fine pieces of Italian silver jewelry, a couple of gold rings, and more rhinestone and colored glass dress-ups than my daughters and I can ever possibly use—though we will certainly try. We are princesses, living in a dumpster castle.

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How do you explain to the average person that dumpster diving isn’t a matter of one or two amazing, earth-shattering finds like you’d maybe see on cable T.V., but rather, the compilation of a hundred small but fabulous discoveries? My life isn’t a highly-rated reality television show where fantastic things are planted, my hunting grounds salted for entertainment value. I’m a mom, a wife, a full-time college student, digging through metal bins every weekend throughout the spring and summer months. I’m a domestic hustler, always looking for another way to either bring in funds or else hold onto the money we do have, and sometimes, the best things I find come from the nastiest places. But not always.

Even those with the most delicate sensitivities and negative opinions of my sometimes cringe-worthy enterprise are inclined to rethink their opinions of dumpster diving when they see or hear about some of the more spectacular things I have salvaged from local bins. You see, dumpsters aren’t all gross, at least not all the time, and amazing finds will catch anyone’s attention. Knowing, through years of trial and error, when to dive, I will often enjoy fairly clean, pleasant bins, bearing unimaginable treasures--no goop or gunk included. And other times, the treasure found will be awesome only in its practicality and easy acquisition—like the aluminum ladder I saw sticking out of a bin at my kids’ school last summer. It came in handy when we were picking cherries and plums this fall. The whole thing was only made more splendid when I bottled a few dozen pints of plum syrup with Mason Jars, lids, and canning rings that were also salvaged from the dumpsters. That ladder might not seem spectacular on the surface, but then, you probably haven’t tasted my plum syrup.

Now, standing back, looking at my neat rows of rich purple liquid, I wonder—only momentarily—if anyone would refuse this sweet goodness should they learn where the supplies came from. It doesn’t really matter though; my family is in love with this year’s creation and I doubt my supply will last through the spring.

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Sometimes I can tell that I’ve hit a treasure trove before even getting out of the car. Just driving up to it, I’ll see something wonderful poking out beneath the lid, or the bin may be overflowing with telltale signs of bootie. On a particularly miserable Sunday, at the last bin I would hit that day, I saw a broken hope chest sticking halfway out of a park dumpster. The day was especially hot, and I had mostly struck out on the ten or so bins I had already checked. That beacon of hope though, was all I needed—once you’ve found the hint of pay dirt, the diving high kicks in, and trivial things like weather, health, and hydration fall to the back burner in favor of a long day’s redeeming discovery.

I had my three young children in the minivan, one sleeping, the other two watching a movie and drinking from sippy cups, while I used every last ounce of strength in my short but sturdy frame to maneuver that ruined chest out of the bin enough that I could force open the cracked wooden lid to access its contents. A child’s pair of leather cowboy boots in the depths of the hope chest sold online that very night, and a few sets of brand new designer pajamas became much-loved additions to my nighttime wardrobe. We’ve boiled countless bags of spaghetti in a stock pot I found that day. It had been full of collectible vintage action figures; those sculpted pieces of plastic were worth a small fortune—they paid for Christmas that year; and the folded bed sheets I found still cover my kids’ twin beds once or twice a month.

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Anymore I’m used to strange looks and sneers when I mention where most of our furniture and housewares came from, not to mention the odd pair of shoes my kids might be wearing; and I barely notice the people unashamedly watching me heave my body or my finds in and out of a hot dumpster on summer afternoons. They don’t know what they’re seeing, and of course they are curious. I know they don’t realize that I am an intrepid treasure hunter, a modern pioneer, and that what they see before them is not just an ugly steel garbage receptacle with a bandana-clad housewife climbing in and out of it—it’s a gold mine, a frontier, or at least a rich quarry wherein lay the building blocks of a magnificent dumpster castle.

Take the bag of comic books and old magazines I found in the summer of 2015, after hacking through the jungle of miscellaneous cables and cords, cast-off notebooks, dried out markers, manila file folders, and half-full packages of yellow #2 pencils that are common to public school dumpsters. They didn’t change my life, but with a little bit of research and ten minutes of online marketing, those discarded rags paid for a week-long trip with my son, exploring our heritage, in northern Mexico, and a girls’ weekend adventure with my daughters a few months later, complete with pedicures and ice cream sundaes. Sometimes spotting treasure requires a creative eye, and a willingness to look beyond what an item might be worth to you personally.

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One of the many social truths that I have come to accept, and have seen proof of, is that of the innumerable, strange, passion or perversion-driven collections that exist in the shadows of our neighborhoods; in back rooms, garages, closets, and cupboards. Only a couple of years into my diving career, I found one of my saddest and strangest dumpster hauls behind the converted 19^th century schoolhouse that is our city building, which led to this firmly-held belief in the weirdness of what my fellow humans will pay good money for. Among a dead woman’s belongings (her family must not have seen the value that I did in her lifetime of treasures), I found three plastic pill bottles—the dark orange kind from a couple of decades ago. Each white lid bore a name scrawled in black Sharpie. I almost threw them back into the dumpster when I saw that they were filled with small human teeth. But then I had a hunch, and added them to the box holding doilies, baby clothes, black and white photographs, and various needle crafts that ended up in my van.

I forgot all about the teeth until a few weeks later, when I had finally found time to sort my recent finds. Under a stack of bedsheets and handkerchiefs, edged with handmade lace, I saw the three bottles. Dumped out on the sheets, all together, I ended up with a small handful of silver capped and filled teeth, and a feeling that someone out there would want to buy them. I get feelings like that--it’s my salvager’s instinct--and I’m right about 80% of the time. Those teeth sold in two different auction lots online—one to a museum of curiosities in Florida. The other buyer was just some random person in Ohio who felt the need to drop $50 on a stranger’s silver baby teeth. Florida paid quite a bit more, but not nearly as much as the guy in Tennessee who bought the collection of used silk stockings and garters from the same pick.

I don’t judge my buyers; we’re all weirdos behind closed doors.

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This summer, my best and busiest yet, was a series of great finds that I somehow wished into existence. People think I’ve got some kind of magic—or else they say it’s God--because I kept finding just exactly what I needed. Well, I’m Agnostic, so I can’t rely on the supernatural explanation. I’d guess it’s more a matter of luck and numbers, but I admit that it was weird, and pretty wonderful, that all I had to do was say what it was that I needed, but didn’t want to pay for, and those items would inevitably show up in one of the dumpsters I climbed into. I’m not kidding. They weren’t crazy things—I didn’t find diamonds or Rolex watches—but I did find the things that I needed. I don’t need extravagance to be happy, at least not extravagance all the time. Sometimes I just need shelves to put my sweaters on, or tree tape to bind my arborvitae over winter. Mostly, I chalk this summer up to determination and consistency, but one instance almost defies explanation.

At the start of this year’s dumpster-diving enterprise, in late spring, I had been thinking about how cool it would be to have my youngest daughter start taking violin lessons. Just coming up with the funds for monthly sessions was going to be a stretch though, so I sent my desires out into the ether, and that very weekend my needs were satisfied. We went for a family hike and then stopped at a college housing unit on the way home. It was the tail end of the dorm-hunting season; the college kids had all flown home or otherwise moved on after the semester ended, and the pickings were now few. I took a quick look anyway; one must seize all opportunities in this business or risk missing something great. Underneath some nasty pizza boxes and a few old shoes, I saw what looked like a black gun case. I snagged it with my trusty rake and found that it was a violin case. I figured it was probably empty; who would throw away a violin? Back at the van though, the kids asked if we could open it. My husband, James, sat in the front seat, rolling his eyes. He was not at all pleased that we had stopped at this dumpster and couldn’t be any less interested in what the instrument case held. Some people just never catch the dumpster-diving vision, even if they enjoy its benefits.

Anyway, I unzipped it, slowly, for dramatic effect. James made a show of again rolling his eyes, and returned to a game on his cell phone. The kids held their breath. The audible gasp that followed, seemed to echo throughout our minivan when we saw the gleaming wooden surface of a beautiful violin, its polished scroll, ebony finger board and tuning pegs smiling up at us. We all stared in awe, except James. His did give us a congratulatory nod though, then asked if we were ever going home. Our find was the talk of the neighborhood for the next week, with hordes of neighbor kids filing in and out of my front door to see the amazing dumpster violin. And of course, I fully expect that someday, my little girl will serenade me with those abandoned strings.

The next weekend, James was thrilled with his “new” top of the line power drill. He didn’t even mind telling his family that it came from the high school dumpster two towns over. As I watch him enthusiastically pressing the trigger, and marveling at the spin and whir of the Makita drill bit, I think he might be coming around.

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Reasons--or excuses if we’re honest--not to do something, not to try, are easy to find, and most people won’t blame you, won’t even notice, if you don’t go out of your way or to unusual lengths to make your dreams come true. On the other hand, most will have plenty to say when one’s efforts include scavenging the depths of big, smelly dumpsters and roadside residential bins. When these conversations inevitably come up, I just like to smile and say, “Have I told you about that time I found a few grams of real gold in the bins?” Or maybe I’ll say something a little more snarky: “So hey, did you ever get those credit cards paid off? No? Darn. Well, the fam and I are going to Disneyland this spring. Yeah, we’re paying cash—you know, because of those nasty dumpsters.”

Like I said, I’m a hustler, a treasure hunter, and maybe a bit of a madwoman. In this business, you need just a few things: a dream, a step ladder, a few unlocked dumpsters, and occasionally, a middle finger.