We used to have a wicker chair on our porch that got pretty old and ratty, AND had a broken leg, so we put it out on the curb. Our next door neighbor saw us putting it out, and asked, "Do you mind if I take that?" We didn't, of course.

Four years later, the neighbor was moving to Kenya, and getting rid of most of her furniture. She put that same chair, which she had repaired, painted, and made to look wonderful, out on the curb. We took it back, and it's now in the guest bedroom at my mom's house. (And yes, she knows its history...)

A few years ago, a chair was made in North Carolina, and put in a furniture store in Pennsylvania. My mother bought it in Pennsylvania and then took it with her when she moved a few months later, to North Carolina. A couple of years ago, while visiting her, she said she didn't want it anymore and gave it to me, so I bought it back to Pennsylvania, even though I didn't much care for it. After having it sit in a corner of my bedroom for a few months I decided I hated it, and put it with a neighbor's things when they were having a yard sale. Some guy paid me 100.00 for it (!) and told me it would fit in perfectly in a spot in the living room of the new house he was having built. In North Carolina.

I'm so glad those two awful old dressers that were sitting on my front porch are finally gone. Everytime I looked at them I always thought of that Jeff Foxworthy joke — "If your lawn furniture used to be your living room furniture, you just might be a redneck."

I think most of the stuff must have been in the house when the former owner got it, and not being an aesthetically inclined person, it must not have bothered her to have such crap sitting about.

The house was chopped up into three horrible apartments at the time she bought it three years ago, and evidently just before that the City of Toronto had to come in and clean the place up because it was so awful. Gulp. Swan's End used to be a Swan Dive. It doesn't look bad now, just quite shabby, and it has terrific bones and the potential to look quite elegant with some work.

Heh, ico. We had a Greek friend in the U.S. who had brought a few bits of furniture, rugs, etc. with him when he came from Greece to go to university; when he returned to Greece some years later, he gave his stuff away, and we got a couple of small tables from him (pretty much all that was left by the time we went to visit him!)... Then when we finally moved here ourselves, we brought them back with us.

It's so funny to think of these really modest, small, inexpensive nothingtables having been shipped back and forth across the Atlantic as if they were heirloom pieces.

Funny, isn't it, where your things can wind up.

Some of the things I did keep from Lei's leavings were:

- two bookcases. I would have had to buy bookcases for my attic workroom anyway.

- an single bed and chest of drawers. I plan to adopt a child in five years or so, and I figure they can be repainted and used (with a new mattress) for her room. I saw a really pretty child's set one day while shopping - cream with a spray of roses here and there. I can do something like that, and they'll look terrific.

- two chairs. I don't like the chairs, but I'm just going to keep them temporarily until I buy new chairs to go with my kitchen table.

- an old dresser. It was one of four (!) in the house, and the best of the lot, structurally sound, and not a bad shape with kind of nice hardware. It's in the attic and holds my sewing supplies. I'm going to paint it.

- an old table. Originally in the basement, I hauled it three stories to the attic where it's my work table for sewing, painting, stained glass, etc. I don't need or want a great table for working on as I would then have to worry about ruining it.

- two more chairs that aren't bad and kind of go with the work table, so they're also in the attic.

- two crappy old armoires. One is in the third bedroom (where the single bed and chest of drawers are) and holds my bathroom supplies. When I redo the bathroom I'll create storage space in it and get rid of the armoire. Armoire number two is in the back yard and holds a bunch of stuff Lei left. It'll also go eventually. The garden shed is also still full. I haven't even really gone through the stuff yet. The inside of the house is keeping me busy enough for the time being.

- various odds and ends that were worth salvaging. For instance, two gorgeous peacock feathers that were bizarrely stuck in some sort of plastic flower arrangement which sat on the living room mantelpiece. The plastic flowers went to Value Village, but I put the feathers away in tissue paper in the dresser in the attic. I don't know how I'm going to use these, but I'm determined to. I found a length of terrific iridescent orange chiffon in one of the dressers on the porch that I've put away with my stash of materials. I'm thinking, Halloween or Thanksgiving decoration? Part of an evening dress? Also there's a really cute plug-in nightlight in the kitchen with a bead-fringed satin shade.

One of our alley-neighbors is a real packrat, and will take ANYthing, apparently. We had an old particle-board entertainment center that we completely busted up to get out of our house, and the guy took the pieces, he said, to paint on. Someone took the rusty chain-link fencing we put back there, though I guess that was recyclable, so it was worth a few bucks.

We're pretty active in our area FreeCycle groups, so we don't put out much usable stuff, but we put any wood scraps, rusted-out old grills, busted answering machines, any crap like that, on top of or next to our trash cans, and it's nearly always gone the next day. The one exception is an empty, non-refillable helium tank--no one's taken that (yet), even though it's recyclable.

I have a story similar to Orange Swan's. When I was in grad school, we gave our old sleeper sofa to a friend. Years later, I was working as a painter, and I came across the same couch in a different apartment complex. It took me a while to recognize it--I kept having a strange sense of deja vu. The couch had been in my parents' house for years before I got it, so I guess I was reminded of home.

Oh, just thought of a good "furniture reincarnation" story. My friend's sister "Callie" spied an old china cabinet in her mother-in-law's garage. It looked rough and had been sitting there unused for years. She asked her mother-in-law if she could have it, and the mother-in-law readily agreed.

Callie refinished the china cabinet and bought new hardware for it, and it looked beautiful. Then suddenly her mother-in-law said the china cabinet had just been a loan and she wanted it back. No offer to compensate Callie for her hard work or expense of course. Callie bit the bullet and gave it back to her.

Last time I moved, I put a rather nice wooden chair and a crappy old couch out by the dumpster (to be taken or thrown away, I didn't really care). I had gotten both for $15 bucks at goodwill. Well, the chair was gone within minutes! I went inside to get a coke, and it was gone when I came back out.

Oh, two more pieces I forgot about... there's an old wood chair in rough shape but that has a really neat Art Deco style carved design on the back and a mirror with a nicely shaped frame, also in rough shape, that I'm contemplating doing over.

I really love salvaging things and making them over, and I just hate waste and ruining things. I actually hated having to take a hammer to those old dressers on the porch. Even though they were beyond salvaging I just kept wishing I had some other option. I am all about creation, not destruction.

Oh, two more pieces I forgot about... there's an old wood chair in rough shape but that has a really neat Art Deco style carved design on the back and a mirror with a nicely shaped frame, also in rough shape, that I'm contemplating doing over.

I really love salvaging things and making them over, and I just hate waste and ruining things. I actually hated having to take a hammer to those old dressers on the porch. Even though they were beyond salvaging I just kept wishing I had some other option. I am all about creation, not destruction.

I wanted to get rid of an old fold-out couch. I lived in L.A. at the time and had no means to carry it to a dump. So I put it out by the curb. It sat there for two weeks, so I brought it back in. A month later I put it out with a For Sale sign on it and it was gone the next morning... the ol' reverse psychology thing... :-)

The header for this post makes me think of hookers. And the comments about how fast things are taken make me uneasy about my neighbors watching my every move...

My ex's parents were replacing their couch/loveseat/armchair set with newer items. They were going to save it for my ex until he moved out. But I moved out of my dad's house before he did and I got the couch of the set.

It was VERY ugly - purple velvet with "wood" and "gold" accents and a bunch of milti-colored "swishes" in the fabric. But it was comfy! The velvet had a way of keeping you warm.

I kept it after we broke up and until I moved in with the current BF. Even though he had an even worse looking, harder to move couch, I kicked mine to the curb. Since it came from my ex, I didn't want it in our new apartment. It was gone before I could make a cardboard sign for it and come back downstairs.

BP that is one funny story!! All of these are, really.

I'm a huge proponent of re-use. No shame! A lot of frugal Yankees are, too. On my tour of Nantucket by a longtime island resident, he made sure to include the "Nantucket Mall" [town dump]. On islands, it's such a hassle to go shopping on the mainland and then drag items back, or have them shipped, that reuse just makes sense. Besides, isn't the world full of enough stuff already? Don't make more just for me.

We don't have curbside pickup in my town, which means that we must often go to the dump. The dump has the usual piles of sorted scrappy garbage, and often you'll see woodworkers or artists or home repair types picking through (and, I'm sure, finding very salvageable things). But they also do the great service of maintaining a Freebie Barn, where people can drop off things that are in good enough condition but are no longer wanted. Most days there's nothing interesting, but occasionally you can score something really, really wonderful. It's all about the timing. The best times there are in spring , about 1:00, right after yard sales end -- people bring the unsold goods in by the boxload.

Sometimes some fairly interesting, vintagey, collectible stuff shows up and doesn't get taken because it doesn't fit the utilitarian aesthetic of most Freebie Barn shoppers. So recently it's occurred to me that I should start grabbing more stuff and reselling it on eBay. There's always a lot of vintage clothing and ceramics, kitchenware, unused fabrics, and home textiles. The kind of thing I routinely pay antieues stores for.

What I wouldn't give to have a Freebie Barn near me.

Nothing from the curb, alas, but lots of stuff pillaged from family, including our sofa and my parents' old pots and pans. My mom was going to throw the pans out, but they were nice old stainless steel and I hated to see them go, a large and small frying pan and a small pot. Whenever I use them, I think of my father, standing at the stove in his bermuda shorts and white undershirt and slippers, patiently heating soup or frying homefries. The homefries were delicious, made from previously boiled little red or white potatoes, sliced and fried brown and crispy, laid out on paper towel and salted. I'd hover like a hyena to snitch a few.

I love our coffee maker from my mom's best friend, too. Her husband had died unexpectedly some years ago, going upstairs to take a nap and just never waking up, and she had decided to sell the house and move to a retirement community. It was right when jon and I had first moved in together. She gave us a lot of stuff, a white dresser, dishes, a handknit afghan, mugs, the coffee maker. She and her husband used to go on weekend trips and collected pairs of mugs from places they visited. We don't seem to have the mugs anymore, but whenever we use the coffee maker, I think of them sitting down together in the morning, just talking and sipping coffee. She still talks to him, and never considered seeing anyone else after he died. "Nah," she'd say, I had enough of that (meaning sex) while he was alive." When she first got married, she thought she had to do it everyday, she said, until a friend told her otherwise. "He was so surprised the first time I said no." I get a kick out of that story.

Last spring I rescued a PIII-550 in perfect shape from my neighbour's bin. Either they imaged it from a restore disk before tossing or they never used the thing as there wasn't a single trace of data anywhere on the hard drive. A fresh copy of W2K to replace 98SE and it nicely replaced the P166 we had been using up until that point.

I've always wondered about the poor homeowners who heave something tatty out to the curb, are thrilled to see it disappear, but then get the damn thing back tarted up to be something else.

Yeah, Junk Brothers, I'm looking at you.

As a woodworker I am always keeping my eye out. Some day I'm going to find that old quartersawn Brazilian Rosewood piece and I will be very happy and my shop will smell of resawn rosewood. mmmmm

I wish you luck, eek. Just make sure you find that rosewood before I do! I've seen old upright pianos on the curb, and they seemed like a rich vein of good wood, if not for the transportation logistics.

I recently scored a silver-faced Marantz tuner (with working superscope, w00t!) that will be worth about $500 on fleaBay (once I replace the output transistors) and I still have the nice mid-cent-mod-ish wooden armchair that I found one day.

A couple of friends of mine have been playing practical jokes on each other for years, always trying to top each other in creativity and general weirdness. A few years ago, friend 'John' hired friend 'Steve' to renovate his offices. Steve was unloading a heap of reno trash at the dump when he saw, sitting in the middle of the floor "shining like a beacon, like a message from god", a stuffed armadillo. He rescued it, and the night before the new offices opened, he managed (through much contortion and possibly dutch courage) to suspend said armadillo from the eaves of the building so that it hung right in the middle of John's window, with a sign on its belly saying 'Bite Me'. No-one at the office (including a couple of engineers) could figure out how the hell he got it there, or how to get it down. It hung there turning in the wind, the Bite Me sign slowly rotating in and out of view, for several days before someone managed to cut it down. It then occupied a prominent space in John's office.

they seemed like a rich vein of good wood, if not for the transportation logistics.

Old pianos often have genuine ivory and ebony keys. The ivory especially is well worth even a few hundred dollars to recover.

I bought this piano for peanuts at the 'recycling mall', which is just the fancy name they gave the store-front part of the city dump. They salvage the good stuff people throw away and sell it on (and deliver). Great stuff!
≡ Click to see image ≡
As for real dumpster diving, I mainly came home with interesting books and art, though I did score a designer see-through plastic folding chair once which fit my 60s style room perfectly.

I have lots of salvaged stuff. When a neighbor died, I got a beautiful old walnut swivel desk chair and a tall oak clerk's chair. Both are lovely, and remind me of my neighbor. I picked up an old aluminum desk chair that reeked of oil, cause it was in a car repair shop. Cleaned it and reupholstered the seat and back, and it looks really great (and the smell is long gone).

Orange Swan, I want pictures!

I was driving home late one night from a bar. I spotted an old dresser out at a curb, and had to go around the block to go back and get it. (One way street). I had been drinking (no lectures, please), and somehow I managed to get this large dresser in the back of my pickup, alone. Giggling my head off, of course. I left it overnight in the bed of my truck, and I just couldn't move it myself! I don't know how I did it. That had to be eighteen years ago, and I still have it.