Dumpster Diving

The title says it all.

Most 20 something year olds without kids go out with friends, or have a few drinks, or go to a movie on Friday nights. Not us. We went dumpster diving.

Let me tell ya...it was amazing! Seriously, no joke.

There's a pretty ritzy (I think the cheapest house might be 750k) neighborhood around the corner from us that has all custom built homes. We jog through the it every now and then, and last week I realized something.  The containers that their materials come in are amazing.  The quality of wood is good, and it has a ton of character.  Perfect for a project I had in my mind.

We, of course, had to go back to get it.  Slight problem...the community is gated, and the gates are closed at night, and there's no way I'm going dumpster diving in the middle of the day with a bunch of wealthy people giving me weird looks.  I do draw my lines at some point.

So we waited until it was dark.  Then we waited (yes, we were totally captain obvious) until a car came by and followed it in.  Our wait was only a few minutes...lucky us!!

To our good fortune (maybe our luck has something to do with my new lucky bamboo), the 'money dumpster' was square in front of the model home, which we knew wasn't occupied, and next to that was a home in the middle of being built.  Sweet!

My good-sport-of-a-husband literally got INSIDE the dumpster and starting chucking out these huge crates, and good planks of wood until we filled up the back of the truck.  I was the loader and look-out.  Can you hear the Mission Impossible Song?!

Wanna see our loot (and my hubby's big goofy grin at being so excited at our find)?!

Oh yeah, we scored the motherload!

We unloaded all of this, and went to bed.  On Saturday morning, after our 6 mile run, we came home and started tearing these bad boys apart.  What.a.mess.

If you know my husband, you know that he's very anal particular about keeping our garage clean.  We took everything apart and made our 'keep pile'.

Then we loaded his truck back up with the non-keepers and tailed someone else in after dark on Saturday night to give those back.  Chris saw nothing wrong with this at all.  He kept saying "If they stop me, I'll just tell them that I took it out of THEIR dumpster, helped myself to what I wanted, and then put the rest BACK in their dumpster.  It was their trash to start off with, so I'm just giving it back!"

Oh...sometimes my husband's logic makes me laugh!

Both vehicles slept in the nice, clean garage on Saturday night.  We were exhausted, but still had to celebrate our good fortune at our very first experience dumpster diving.

Ah...strawberry margaritas (and Kodi treats)...the perfect end to a perfect night (for all three of us)!

Stay tuned for a post at the end of this week on what we created with all that wood!