junkin in germany

When I was a child, there was something in the nearby suburbs called “spring clean out” or “fall clean out”. Twice a year, these neighborhoods were allowed to put ANYTHING to the curb… Washing machines, paint cans, or anything that wouldn’t fit in their average sized trash can they took to the curb each week. I have childhood memories of driving around in the evening looking for a new bike — my dad would pull over and grab one or even two and we would take them home and he would teach us how to take them apart, change the tire tube, switch the seats, hook up and grease the chain… They even let us spray paint the frame any color we wanted… I remember one year I put several coats of purple paint on mine and it made a swirly pattern… mostly because I put WAY TOO MUCH paint on it, but I didn’t care… it was my cool purple bike!

As an adult, I have retained this thrifty perspective that one man’s trash can be another man’s treasure…

It makes my husband crazy.

We both grew up in families where money was short and needed to be stretched as far as possible. This background has made me into yard sale junkie/thrift store shopper/ and yes… trash picker… No I don’t spend my free time literally diving into dumpsters… but if there is a little boy batman bike with the front tire flat and a training wheel bent in half sitting by the dumpster??? You can bet your bottom I’ll be jumping out to grab it!

My husband on the other hand, would rather save his money another month or two, and then go buy whatever it is that he wants… He is a purger too – so whatever I cart home I need to have at least 2 uses for, or else I’ll be taking it back to the dumpster where I found it…

So as you can see, we are very good for one another!

Well, this weekend was “Junkin” here in our little town… Much the same as “spring clean out”, you can find just about anything on the curb. We had the kids in daycare for the day to go run some errands and have lunch together at a little restaurant downtown, and while we were driving home, I noticed some questionable piles in front of a few houses… “Hunny!!! Can we PLEASE drive around!??!!” He wasn’t too thrilled about it… but he humored me… and we had a great afternoon!

We found a lovely corner cabinet, a new castle playhouse for the kids, and a few other things… It was a great just laughing and talking about things we saw. It was also amusing to watch other people jump out of their vans to grab stuff! By the time we found our cabinet, Seth was getting “into it” and said “Quick hunny! Go put your hand on it!” LOL! Apparently we were being followed by a huge white van and two guys had already jumped out and were on their way!

Here are some pictures of our “treasures” – I’ll post some more about our castle playhouse cleaning another time… it was pretty grubby so we decided to have a family wash session!