THINK SCROUNGE !!!

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Anyhow, once I've located a likely scrounging ground, I go to the supervisor on the job and ask his permission to haul old materials away. He generally tells me to go ahead. Or, sometimes, he'll ask for a "hunting fee" (my term for any payment I have to make to obtain the scrounging rights I want).

Now I figure that I can and should haggle whenever I'm asked to fork over cash for permission to pick through old lumber, paneling, etc., that's already bound for the city dump. (it's a moot question, anyway, whether or not such money ever gets back to the firm doing the demolition.) So I drive a hard bargain on the deal even though I don't mind laying out a little for my scrounging rights (since, at least in the mind of the project's straw boss, I've just 'legitimately bought permission to drag away as much of the old building as I want).

For instance, the last time I did this, I paid exactly $3.00 for unlimited rights to salvage anything I chose from a two story frame house. I went in with a claw hammer and came out with about 40 feet of 1 X 12 pine shelving, a large semi-circular oak stairway, assorted 1 X 2's, 2 X 4's, and 1 X 6's. (My hammer, though, didn't survive prying out those stairs. Save your pennies for a wrecking bar. It cuts down the wear and tear on hammers and allows you to pull out whole planks without splintering or scarring them.)

From the pine, I made custom shelves for myself and for a friend. The stairs will eventually be transformed into a coffee table, and the remaining wood will become the formerly hard to find "scraps around the shop".

Just try purchasing that much lumber down at the local yard for $3.00. You won't even get past the office! Oh, I'll admit that what I salvaged isn't brand new or clean or cabinet quality. Some of it's even cupped and warped. So what else can I tell you? Commercial lumber isn't exactly perfect these days either. In fact, my wood is at least well seasoned an apparently unguaranteed quality of any timbers currently offered by most lumberyards.

Besides, I'm not a cabinetmaker and wouldn't know what to do with really fine quality wood anyway. I'm just looking for shelving and furniture material at the lowest possible price preferably nothing! I can find.

Of course, if I had wanted superior grades and varieties of lumber, I could have gotten them on that very job. While pulling out what I did take I saw solid cherry, one inch thick, tongue and groove paneling (worth many dollars!) running halfway up the wall in one room beautiful quarter sawn oak flooring huge exposed ceiling beams mahogany cabinet doors, and I think you get the idea. Unfortunately, however, I live in an apartment that features limited storage space so I could only drag home what I had reasonable possibilities of using in the very near future. Still, when I think of that cherry going under the bulldozer's blade.

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