Trash or Treasure?

It would appear that building is a wasteful process. They always send out a little extra, just in case something is broken, or cut wrong, or just plain needs to be redone. This is the rubbish pile that the builders are using to dump all their rubbish while they're building our house. It is filled with the usual stuff, packaging from the building products, some cardboard , but a lot plastic; the leftover packaging from the builders lunch (or their beer?); but there is also a lot of wood offcuts from form work, steel leftover from building the frame, and lots of electrical cable remnants. The man who built the frame told us on Friday that he was finished now, so to grab anything we wanted, because they will just throw the lot at the end.

So we scavenged through the pile to see what we might find useful.

I salvaged several of these reels, used to hold electrical cable. DH is going to cut one up to make a stand for his radio controlled car, that saves us the $10 to buy one, and keeps a bit of plastic out of landfill. DD will probably use a couple to play with, roll around, and maybe stack. I daresay a few will be used as stands of some kind, as they're quite sturdy. Threaded through some of them (DD's idea), is the leftover on a roll of the enviroseal, nearly a metre length. Not sure what it will be used for yet, but no doubt it will come in handy. There are also a few short lengths of black plastic pipe that can be used in place of dowel in some applications.

Speaking of black plastic, we also scored this huge (about 2m x 3m) pieces of black plastic. It's very strong, and is black on one side, and white on the other. I can think of many uses for this, from putting down to kill off grass in an area, to the lining for a duck pond one day.

But the best score of the day was all this steel framing. There is a huge amount of it, probably several hundred dollars worth. DH thinks it is probably enough for us to make another garden shed if we want to. There is also several lengths of guttering, and 2 full sheets of colourbond roofing iron. And all this was going to be thrown away!

When we first moved here, we had very little in the way of this sort of stuff. We had lived in a unit, and hardly even had any tools, let alone bits of scrap wood or metal. Now we're slowly starting to build up a collection, that no doubt will see us in good stead when we have to build or make something.