My family is a family of collectors. My grandfather was very handy and my grandmother was crafty so if they ever saw something that could be fixed or refurbed in the trash they would pick them up and take them home. We always had storage rooms full of stuff waiting to be fixed and a lot of the things in the house were picked up out of people's garbage.. from shelves to chairs to toys we picked them up. Growing up my mom followed this tradition.. I can remember sitting in the car as a kid and preteen mortified as my mom stopped in front of peoples' houses shining our headlights in their windows getting things out of their trash. I can remember her saying "If they didn't want it to go to a good home, they wouldn't have put it out so early!". The funny thing is my cousins all recount eerily similar stories of their parents... As I got older sometimes I would willingly join my mom on these adventures.. one time we took a huge wooden garage door that would make an awesome headboard. We had to take my grandfather's old, loud, stick shift truck to a borderline area of town- we waited until midnight to get it.. it was quite the adventure! Anyway, today I found myself looking at the garbage piles as I drove home searching for treasure.
Oh girl, you just made me feel so much more normal. My family never did that, but Christopher and I love to rebuild thing so we're always watching for pieces of furniture or other things that people have thrown out. Our current project is to rebuild this two benches that we found a couple of weeks ago. I am pretty much always mortified when we pick stuff up, but at the same time, people threw it out for trash and we could fix it and make it better than before so it's really a win win... but also just really awkward. The whole time I'm thinking "please don't look out your house window, please don't look out your house window..." :P
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