It’s hard rubbish time in my neck of the woods.
Usually I am a net importer so I pay attention to what’s out there.
The ladder leader for many years has been the stackable cheap plastic outside chair. Dark green or white. Often still usable but a bit powdery from exposure to the elements.
For second place I am going for the indoor cooling fan on a stand. Usually there is nothing wrong with them. I think people chuck em out in summer… what do we need this for? The next summer’s heatwave they remember why they had it.
Third place is the for our six burner bbq. The tray is usually burned out or rusted out. I have been known pillage burners and grills for my bbq. Today was the first time I have seen a Weber chucked out. And no it was rooted so I didn’t grab it.
Special mention to a rising candidate. The outside has heater. Those things where you put the bottle inside the base there is a stem and an aluminium hood to radiate the heat out. These are relatively new products and I figure they are only just starting to burn out.
Over to you.
We call it “inorganic” week here.
Used to be computer monitors but not so much now.
Barbecues are top, without a doubt. Newer versions are nicer and cheaper, so rusty, shitty little Masport 4 burners like mine are everywhere. I’m keeping mine though until it is confirmed dead.
In the words of Sam & Dave, “Hold On, I’m Coming”.
I have some photos to post of our recent “lomtalanítás” (I am in Hungary), but I am WFH and I need to do some WFH before I spend too much time on the Forum.
At the risk of setting high expectations, watch this space!
I realise this contribution may have lost a bit of its “fizz” given that it has taken me 24 hours to follow up my post above, but I was working all day yesterday and I then spent the little time I had post-work grappling with Imgur and Photobucket to see if I could get my pictures to appear here. Let’s see if it works, shall we?
Here are two pictures of the recent lomtalanítás in our district in Budapest and one picture of a chair that I rescued from a lomtalanítás many years ago and subsequently had done up.
The great thing about this annual clear-out is that it lasts barely 18 hours. Unless you begin early (and many do), you are meant to start dumping your stuff on the pavement in front of you house/building early on the Friday evening and then it stays there all night (bar the bits that other people have “rescued”) and gangs of workers come round with lorries at the crack of dawn and pick it all up. This first stage is a bit rough-and-ready and if you go out on the street first thing on Saturday, it looks like the aftermath of a small war (just guessing), with broken glass, bits of broken books, CDs, odd shoes and so on all over the place. However, soon afterwards a second load of workers come round with brooms and dustcarts and take all that away. By Saturday evening, the streets are just like they were.
It’s a tried and tested process and it is fascinating to see what people throw out.
Edit: “hurrah!”
@pajp
I’d just like to acknowledge your work tonight.
@freddy-steady Thanks. It seems to be the nature of the beast that discussions on the forum move on rapidly and if you are a bit late in getting your contribution in, you end up talking into the void.
I suppose it’s a bit like being in a pub and finding out that the conversation has moved on when you get back from going to the loo.
@pajp
Some truth in that mebbe. How come you are in Budapest? (You might well be Hungarian of course!)
@freddy-steady
We are in Budapest because we used to live here and Mrs Pajp is Hungarian and we come back regularly. One of the unexpected advantages of Covid has been the freedom to work from home, which – for a while at least – means the freedom to work from abroad.
I once had a half-Hungarian girlfriend. I went to her folks’ for dinner, where they’d made pork chops with lots of mashed garlic.
I wasn’t diagnosed at that time, but I knew garlic gave me the trots. I ate it to be polite but, not long after, really wished I hadn’t.
I wasn’t invited back again.
@fentonsteve Got to be careful with garlic. I once had a spaghetti bolognese cooked by a student housemate that had so much garlic in it (in powered form, if I remember correctly) as to be almost inedible.
My pal is no great cook and his wife has no sense of smell. We once went round and he’d put two bulbs, not cloves, of garlic in the bolognese. The whole house stank.
We got takeaway pizza delivered.
The outside gas heater is the worst piece of first world indulgent shite ever made. Put on a facking jumper, fer Chrissake, don’t pump unnecessary CO2 into the world because you’re too damn lazy, selfish and complacent to layer up while you swig your beers and ruin expensive meat products. This abomination has to be top of any list that leads to the oblivion tip.
Round here, the outdoor rubbish list is headed by that big stack of enormous brick coloured plastic plant pots I bought fifteen years ago while on a crusading veg patch binge following the drunken viewing of a self-sufficiency programme. I bought thirty of the blighters, and I’ve had twenty six of them left in a pile by the side gate ever since. Time to go.
Second on the list is the three foot deep pile of laurel and bay twigs I cut off the rear hedges back in the spring. They now house a huge population of small crawling things which have provided the ecologically sound justification for extended procrastination when it comes to shoving the pile into the huge green bin for collection by the council. Let the little darlings carry on their scurrying, but just let them scurry at the tip instead of in a pile outside the conservatory window. Gotta go.
Finally, the third item is the most problematic. It’s the three square yards of pampas grass that has grown from the little three-shoots piece that my mate gave me ten years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He brought the shoots to work in the boot of his car, and I planted ’em out in a space next to our front drive. Luckily, I plonked it down in an area bounded by paths, so it has only been able to spread that far. Trouble is, it’s now so dense you can’t see through it, it’s more than nine feet tall, and the leaves have got razor edges which will slice through skin like nobody’s business. I need a flame thrower, or a gang of machete wielding maniacs to attack it. It’s going to be back-breaking work to dig the bugger out, and I’ll need a small truck to take it to the tip. There’s not enough glyphosate in the shed to kill it all, and in any case I don’t wish to poison the water table. I’ve taken to hacking lumps out from time to time with a felling axe, but what I really need to do is to clear the lot. When I bite that bullet, I may be gone for some time.
Who’d have thought a machete required in the burbs of England.
Machetes are de rigeur amongst some of the young people in the modern English burbs.
Pith helmets have yet to catch on, however.
Catch on what?
Catch on the branches of a banyan tree, causing you to lose your equilibrium and plunge to your doom, gesticulating wildly.
Who says they haven’t.
By gad Carruthers, the natives are revolting.
“Y’see the natives had it in their noddles that if a chap’s soul was pure then the snake bite wouldn’t harm him. Poor old Hargreaves died almost immediately, in horrible agony.”
Oddly enough I met someone I was at college with back in the seventies and hadn’t seen for forty years, a Carruthers at that.
Similarly, I have a clump of bamboo in the back garden. It is kept in check by a patio, a concrete shed base and next door’s garage wall, but the roots spread into whatever space it can find.
Every year I have to take out half of it at ground level, and strip the lower branches from the rest. It does a great job of screening and sounds nice in the breeze, but if I ever wanted rid of it I think it would be easier to move house.
I used to live right in the middle of Norwich. I proudly planted a Pampas Grass in our tiny front garden. Some years later it was roughly ten feet wide and fifty feet high.
I read somewhere that in its homeland (in Argentina?) there are regular prairie fires and that is how to “prune”.
One Saturday afternoon after a long liquid lunch in the Unthank Arms I poured a few litres of white spirit at the pampas’ base. I flung the match.
The flames were terrifying but even worse was the the rolling blanket of smoke which quickly covered the entire Golden Triangle.
Fire engines appeared as people tumbled out into the streets coughing and wheezing.
The local paper the next morning reported “Mystery blaze brings Norwich to a standstill.”
Golden Triangle…. hurrrrrrrrrrrr
No fun if it’s engulfed in smoke.
Respect.
Pampas grass is one of the “signifiers” of a swinger’s house. Just saying.
Well, bugger me. I never knew. No wonder those Wiccans in Winsford kept dangling trinkets over my garden fence!
Thanks to the odd tastes of the previous owner of our house, we have a rather huge and outrageous Aussie plant in our front garden.
Not long after we moved in, a friend said that folk might mistake it in the dusky gloaming for a pampas and turn up on our doorstep expecting a bit of fun.
I responded that those folk would be carefully informed that pampas grass is for yer vanilla swingers.
Oh Good Lord no. Eurgh. I could roll with Guacamole though.
My other half has 3 Michael Ball CDs.
I bought a neighbour’s vinyl collection (200+ LPs) a couple of years ago. Includes four Kenny G albums, which the charity shop refused to take.
I’m very glad you asked – I’ve been waiting to get this off my chest.
Hard rubbish behaviours changed markedly in my area over the course of lockdown. I’m not sure if it’s people reorganising their homes to make more space, greater laxity in the council pick up schedule or just a generalised lack of societal esprit de corps, but here are the top three items I’ve noticed to be gaining market share in the last few months. These things are absolutely bloody everywhere right now.
1. Paintings of a dog. I’ve noticed literally dozens of these dumped at local tipping sites of late. Curiously, they all appear to be paintings of the same dog, albeit undertaking different activities. He’s a little terrier-looking kind of thing, with a bit of a cheeky glint in his eye, and he’s generally dressed up in human clothes. For example, the one I saw this morning on my way to work, he was wearing a chef’s outfit and baking a cake. Or the one I saw at the weekend, he was dressed as the speaker of the House of Commons. I feel like I’m missing something here; is this a well known dog? Is he famous nationally, or just locally? Are all the paintings being commissioned by the same person (maybe the owner), or has there been some sort of local craze, whereby multiple households have become obsessed enough with a dog to commission a painting of him, and then have subsequently fallen out of love with the canine to the point they’ve felt the need to dump the painting? How does the dog feel about all this?
2. Giant mechanical statues of Sylvester Stallone, with motorised waving arms. Typically, these are approximately 6-7 feet tall, and cover the various eras of Stallone; although curiously “Copland” era Stallone statues are currently in the ascendance. There was a local trend, circa 2018, to have these things at the end of your front path, welcoming in visitors. It wasn’t uncommon at that time to visit a neighbour and be gently beckoned onto their property by a grinning John Spartan from Demolition Man. At first, the novelty was endearing, but over time people began to tire of the affectation, and soon enough the bastard things began to be callously discarded all round the neighborhood. The issue reached its apotheosis a few weeks ago, when I drove home from work and found myself passing through an area in which the streets were lined from end to end with discarded waving Stallones. In some places, the crowd of Stallones was as many as 5 or 6 deep, and the overall effect was of being granted a demented parade by a society composed entirely of Slys. Lincoln Hawk, Marion Cobretti, Rocky Balboa, Angelo “Snaps” Provolone: they were all there in spades, dozens of them at a go, and for the few short minutes it took me to pass through the area, I was their King; waved at by all and sundry. The effect was only broken when some local youths dropped a waving animatronic Tango from Tango & Cash from an overhead bridge onto the windscreen of my car. What is wrong with people?
3. The Cursed Urn of Rhashak Malviv. Bit of a weird one this. We’re all aware of The Cursed Urn of Rhashak Malviv; the decaying relic of a long dead empire, lost to to mists of time and the unsealing of which will unleash an army of half-lion, half-locust hellbeasts who will proceed to sweep across the land, leaving behind them a grim torrent of death, pain and misery. Well, imagine my surprise at the start of lockdown when I spotted the Urn casually discarded in a local hedgerow. Obviously, I took it home and buried it in the back garden, entombed for all eternity in a lead-lined casket, carefully anointed with holy water supplied by the village priest. But then the next day I spotted the Urn again; this time in a disused shopping trolley tipped on its side by the railroad embankment. The day after, there were three Urns together, perched perilously atop the upper lip of my usual bus stop. The trend has continued since then, unabated, to the point where it’s becoming difficult to walk on the common without literally tripping over a Cursed Urn of Rhashak Malviv, and I personally have at least half a dozen of the bastard things casually strewn around the back garden. A few months ago I used to look askance at people for throwing these items away; it just seemed so careless, so entirely without thought for the fate of humanity. But as time has gone by, I’ve reflected that it’s been a tough 18 months for all of us, and – really – who am I to judge? Maybe one day I’ll look out across the roiling oceans, irradiated wastelands and great corpse mountains of the Rhashakian apocalypse and think we probably should have exercised a bit more caution, but I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.
Bloody typical. I spent months scouring the charity shops for The Cursed Urn of Rhashak Malviv before giving in and paying through the nose for one on eBay, and there you go picking it out of the rubbish.
I would suggest focusing on the charity shops of South West London, where apparently The Cursed Urn of Rhashak Malviv has a steady reputation as one of the urns most frequently donated. Still can’t believe Q gave it 5 stars.
I’ve got one of the super-rare Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot Stalones. It’s a 15ft Sergeant Joseph A. “Joe” Bomowski with a haunted look of fear and regret. We bought it as a novelty doorstop, but due to a tragic Tap-esque miscalculation of scale, we’ve subsequently had to buy an aircraft hanger to cover for our mistake.
Chiz – what an insane coincidence. During the first lockdown I was desperate for a Bomowski, but everywhere was sold out. You could get them on the black market, but we’re talking an arm and a leg, and I wanted the entire body.
After lengthy negotiations, my wife agreed on a compromise; no to Joe Bomowski, but we’d go grab a much more readily available Tutti Bomowski (the titular “Mom”, played by Estelle Getty of The Golden Girls fame). I wanted to go large, so we ordered the 50ft edition, and planned to put it in the back garden, for all the neighbours to marvel at.
Well, inevitably, there was a mix up in the ordering process, and instead of one 50ft tall Tutti Bomowskis, I ended up with 500 1ft tall Tuttis, all delivered on a “no returns”, basis. Disaster.
As noted above, I take a dim view of fly tipping, and the local council are explicit that they will not collect this specific model. So, I’m stuck in a house with hundreds of Tutti Bomowskis, watching everything with their little squinty eyes, probably judging it all. Sometimes at night I hear noises and I when I put the lights on and go investigate, I swear the Bomowskis have moved, but there’s simply too many of them to be sure.
I tell this story here as a warning to others: don’t make the same mistake I did.
You were lucky. My S!OMMWS Stallone came as part of a multi-pack ‘Movies with Unnecessary Exclamation Marks!’ offer. I’m stuck with a giant Elvis from Girls! Girls! Girls!, Jason Robards from Tora! Tora! Tora!, Liam Neeson from Schindlers List! and some big-breasted vixen from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. I’ll take offers for any except the last one.
They’re all on bloody pallets, an all.
Apologies for the pedantry, but I believe you mean you’ll take! Offers for any except! The last one.
For all those who were questioning the existence of my Big Bomowski aircraft-hanger doorstop, here’s proof. Away with you, doubters!
I’m convinced my neighbours live in a TARDIS. The sheer cubic-metred volume of crap they put out – and they have no shed or garage to store it in – makes me wonder where it’s all been before appearing on the verge.
Since I’m currently living 20 feet off the ground this is no longer an issue for me, although I can see an upside-down takeaway container on the grass out the front. There are dead plants in pots on the balcony, but they can safely be ignored until spring.
I was fascinated by the Oz institution of the annual council kerbside pickup when I moved there. I won’t be there for our week next May, sadly. Junk is junk of course, however it’s disposed of, but it leads to a fair amount of recycling and up cycling as people cruise the streets looking for stuff they can use. You see utes loaded to the gunwales and beyond with metal junk, presumably to be resold on to recyclers. We merrily toss out junk from the garage every year, only to find that next year, mysteriously, it’s still there.
I think you forgot two important minor categories, Junior. There’s cheap, garish plastic tat for kids, very often with wheels and battery-powered, thrown out by parents who’ve tripped over it once too often or have been driven mad by the noise. And there’s clothes airers, which seem to be the most unreliable bits of kit in the entire industrial world. There’s a guy on Twitter who posts nothing but pictures of defunct airers dumped in the street in London. There’s niche for you.
Thep, our court is being circled by white vans as I type.
When I lived in the affluent Eastern suburbs of Sydney – Paddington Woollahra. Now that was high class hard rubbish. Around here it’s well, plastic chairs , fans and rusted out BBQs
I helped my Mum load up her footpath here in Brisbane a few weeks ago for the annual curbside collection. She lives in a fairly swanky part of town, and there were three vans cruising her section of the street. Dad’s golf clubs, already old when he acquired them in the mid 90s during an ill-considered foray into sport, were gone before I even made it up the stairs. Within an hour, several broken, wooden chairs and a decomposing particleboard bookcase had gone, and literally nothing was left when I departed soon after.
I was quite chuffed to see such enthusiastic recycling at play.
1. Dogs. Technically not hard rubbish I suppose, as many of them are soft and fluffy, but barely a Thursday morning goes by without seeing a few of these lockdown impulse purchases chained to kerbside recycling bins (or the fortnightly landfill bin, for the really heartless). That shit-strewing furniture-mangler seems like such a good idea when you were home all day, didn’t it? Now you’re back in the office and fancy a proper holiday it’s not so appealing. Two weeks ago you were afraid someone was going to steal your precious pug-nosed AlslabDoodle, and now you can’t even pay your local butcher to come and take the little fucker away.
2. Pallets. I have two behind my shed. One of them, with the footprint of a chest freezer, came with about six tiny boxes of tiles on it and no, the driver couldn’t take it away again, because Covid. They are indestructible and too big to fit in the car. I’ve tried smashing them with a sledgehammer but it just bounces off. I’m thinking of buying more stuff and building a Wicker Man of pallets. Pallet man. That’ll show ’em.
3. Toasters. Designed to fail the day the warranty expires.
Somewhat opposite to the topic – at the tip last Saturday, I spied a heavy stone vase by the side of one of the bins. Thought it would look nice in the garden with a plant in it. Presented it, beaming, to the missus when I got back. She pointed out it must have come from a funeral, and that she’d rather not have it around. Took it back forthwith. Washed my hands.
Sort of confirms @bingo-little ‘s warning!?
Indeed.
You need not think that merely washing your hands will rid you of the mark of Rhashak Malviv. Unfortunately, if your flesh made contact with the receptacle in question then it’s highly likely that on judgement day you will be transformed into a hideous pillar of hair, fang and gristle, cursed to roam the countryside and seek out the unworthy souls upon whom the Lord Malviv will feed in the afterlife.
At that stage, you may also want to consider consulting the “Pomade Suggestions” thread for reliable advice on how best to approach your new look.
Very wise.
I like the idea of being able to leave stuff out on agreed dates for anyone who wants it to take away, though for things like fans it sounds like an H and S nightmare.
We don’t have that in the UK, and people who are too cheap or lazy to take stuff to the recycling centre often dump it by the bins outside my flat to make it someone else’s problem, as you’ll see from this photo I took the other winter. We’ve had mattresses, white goods, entire bathroom suites even.
In fact people take advantage of the bins to dump everything but kitchen si…. oh.
Near us, the R’n’Bs* would have that before a single snowflake had a chance to land on it.
(*rag and bone…. don’t get excited, Bingo)
1970s leather reading chair. (Not sure. Needs a refurb. It had mice living in it when stored in the shed).
Lawnmower with holes in the plastic base that makes a terrific racket.
(Already dispatched) A large lump of concrete that fell off a passing lorry into my hedge has now been discreetly transported by moonlight to next door’s garden. House sold. Empty. Diggers in for the wilderness that is the large rear garden. I put it amongst the rubble of a collapsed wall.
Shame, I love reading leather. Those sample books you used to get. Very engrossing.
They gave out sample books at Tyburn?! Like, way out gross man!
So hard rubbish collections aren’t a thing in the UK ?
Down here scavenging prior to collection is illegal. Which is odd as it reduces the load and it’s not as if they sort on collection. It all gets chucked in a giant mobile masher.
You have to pay £30 for my local council to take 3 items. I’ve used it in the past for white goods, mattresses etc. I tried to get them to take the lump of concrete but they wouldn’t. I should have used the pavement/public safety angle, but even then, they’re lazy bastards. Even getting a new bin out of them is a task for Hercules.
ps: when a load, and I mean a load, of slurry was all over the road and pavement, they wouldn’t come out to clean that. Not a matter of public H & S, apparently, despite the pedestrians, kids, prams etc. Unbelievable.
From the sounds of your I thought others collecting the stuff was the point, to rehouse items before they went to landfill
Here in Essex we have to arrange for the local council to collect large items if we can’t take them to the recycling centre ourselves. Last year I had them collect an old fridge freezer, a cooker and a sofa (£15 quid a pop. If I had been more organised I could have saved a little by having them collected together – or I could just have done what others do and dumped them by the midden, if I didn’t have some social conscience).
Good man. I loathe fly tipping, and what’s more, the mess that gets left in local beauty spots is enraging. I just don’t get the mentality, or lack off. If you visit somewhere beautiful, leave it that way FFS.
I paid the council to take away a sofa as it didn’t have a fire safety label so the charity shop couldn’t take it.
14 weeks I have waited for it to be taken away, despite several emails asking for it to be done (I was told three weeks originally revised upwards to seven due to driver shortages)
Speaking to some friends yesterday they only waited the three weeks, I sent another email yesterday and have been told it is in the hands of the collection team.
Shame. Mine are pretty good. You submit a form online and get a call within a couple of hours to take payment and arrange a collection date. That collection date was always a few weeks later, but was always honoured. The downside is that they only collect from the roadside, so The Light and I had to lug the old stuff down from my second floor flat the night before. I would always write on the object that the council were to collect it, for fear of others thinking I was fly-tipping on my own doorstep.
The cooker and fridge were meant to have been taken as part of the delivery service for the new goods, but sadly I found that delivery round here wasn’t nearly as efficient as collection. That led to old white goods sitting in the spare room for weeks at a time, but at least I had the spare room to put them in.
I was told to leave it on the pavement, luckily our neighbour kindly let us leave it at the side of his house otherwise it would have been outside the house all this time.On one of the emails I did say that if I had fly tipped it it would have been taken away.
They are supposed to contact us before it is removed as of yet nothing.
Queensland seems to be different from Victoria, as so often. Nobody seems to care. A lot of the good stuff ends up in the tip shop, of course, so scavengers are getting in the way of that…
They are, but it’s the same people who ‘deliver’ Rhashak Malvivs. Most judge this as a risk too far.
Ok I now understand the slant of some posts. Down here once a year your area will have a hard rubbish collection. You have 2 metres by 2 by 4m in our area, to be neatly stacked. No chemicals car parts , bits of rubble – sorry @RobC I can’t help you. But fridges stoves mattresses, furniture, electronics gym equipment. All of that shit can go. This weekend is the last one before collection. It will be a white van feeding frenzy.
Just the one? You can get four collections per calendar year down this way…just book on the council’s website, and they’ll tell you when. As you point out, a good deal of it’s gone* by time they arrive.
*I may have been guilty of this once or twice myself in the distant past.
Decking.
Decking.
Decking.
You always wish you hadn’t.
Decking + chainsaw + hatchet = kindling.
Got a job lot from a mate years ago and still burning it. Also the screws vapourise in the wood burner.
I have decking that came with the house. Had it re-floored about ten years ago. Getting spongey again. I might conduct a sacred fire rite upon its once trendy B & Q arse.
Decking: a rat hotel. Don’t come crying to me etc.
Tell me about it. After all peaceful esoteric attempts to move them on, I had to get heavy and get The Man in. Since then, the hexes and pentagrams have worked wonders in keeping them away. Not leaving bread bits around for the birds has added to their efficacy and also the fact that my next door neighbour t’other side has moved and stopped leaving dog food bowls in his garden.
If you have an old mattress with an obscenely unmistakable spunk stain that can be seen from space, it is your civic duty to leave it – stain facing outwards – propped up for the entire street and all passing motorists (and indeed aircraft) to see. Call it publicity for the rhythm method.
I daren’t. My cover would be well and truly blown. (Between me and you… shhh… I am The Green Helmet. I fight low level rural crime three evenings a week between 9pm and 11.3Opm. The residents of Lower Drabcock, Nether Snurtle, Bubo Spinney and Ricketts St Beauchamp sleep well on those nights when they see an image of my radioactive bell end beamed up into the night sky!).
Radioactive? You went to Chernobyl!
I have heard it called that, but one has to be specific in the back streets of Rangoon.
My neighbours cars.
A 13 year old white van and two diesels over 10 years old.
We live in a pleasant suburban cul de sac and my favourite neighbour is “Mr Trebus” (not his real name) because his house permanently has a pile of crap outside, including a couple of smashed up vans. He gives zero fucks about his lawn and the overall street appeal of the house. In many ways I wish I had his attitude but I don’t want no trouble squire with the others so I keep the lawn etc just this side of OK.
He waved at me today for the first time. I’ve waved at him for over three years but he has never reciprocated. Today, he caught my eye and gave me a decisive and intentional wave. I think it’s because a few weeks ago we actually had a conversation while he was outside having a smoke.