Yesterday morning as I was running my daily 5k I saw a bunch of “treasures” piled up besides several people’s trash cans; several people had just had a yard sale and the things that they didn’t sell they just threw away- which meant a bunch of free goodies for an enterprising young man such as myself! When I got back home from my run I immediately grabbed a wagon and headed back up the street to do a little bit of “dumpster diving”. By the time I got back I had collected a wagon load of treasures that included a suitcase, an old carpet steamer, a nice piece of telescoping rod and a half dozen or more containers of varying sizes and shapes (John really enjoys doing experiments so he uses a lot of jugs, bins and bottles). I stowed all of my collection in our storage shed until 9:15 when it started to look stormy and we all had to come inside, seeing that everyone had nothing to do I offered to let them take apart the carpet steamer I got and they all enthusiastically agreed to help. It took us about 50 minutes to go from a fully assembled carpet steamer to a heap of parts and trash.
We had everyone from Isaac on up photographing the process so we got a lot of good (and some not so good) pictures, here are some of the highlights:
First Isaac and John took the bottom off.
Then John and I took out the actual steamer hardware
Then Luke took apart the “guts” of the steamer and we all split up the remaining parts.
My share of the “haul”: A high voltage power switch, 4 casters and a 5 foot section of double-strand wire.
After it stopped raining I put together an 18 clue treasure hunt to tell my younger sibs where the rest of the loot I had collected was hidden. They found it and John has already done an experiment with some of the jugs: see how long you can bang them before everyone else goes crazy!
