A lot of places are starting off with a full farm - complete with barns and fences and buckets of nuts and bolts.
We started here with bare
land. And often times, there are not
enough tools to go around.
At the same time, I recently attended a funeral. On the day after the funeral, Jocelyn and I went to the house and helped with tidying and whatnot. The key is that the family was trying to find a good new home for a lot of things. One person tried to shovel something, but the handle on the shovel broke. So they threw out the shovel. I was thinking "my guys back at the lab would probably love that shovel blade. I bet they could whip up a decent handle for that in no time." But, we were traveling in a tiny rig that had nearly zero space for stuff. Jocelyn did manage to pack a few blankets and pillows for the guys.
So I'm kinda thinking: if a person is gonna drive to
wheaton labs, what might be some stuff that they think will be junk for their next garage sale, or to dump off at the goodwill, that would be of great value here. So I thought I would start a list.
- blankets and pillows
- broken (yet repairable) tools
- hand tools
-
books (fiction and non-fiction)
- nuts, bolts, screws, doo-dads, wire, rope, hose clamps, washers, all
thread, nails, doomaflotchies, hooks, pipe, hose, cotter pins, spring pins, zircs ...
- fishing gear
- bows, arrows, targets ...
- duct, stovepipe, brick (especially clay brick)
- buckets - we need oodles of buckets
- metal barrels - espeically the ones that are smaller than 55 gallon.
-
wood barrels, or even wood half barrels
- tape (especially that blue masking tape that we use for labeling everything)
- lumber (nothing with glue, like plywood, waferboard or particle board please)
- hardwood branches or logs for making handles or other projects
-
lawn chairs
- tents
- sleeping bags
- wool: hats, socks, blankets, anything. Including raw wool
- steel scraps for welding bits and bobs (we have a welder and a plasma cutter)
- metal roofing
- cedar shakes
- bicycles and all sorts of bike parts/tools/baskets/racks/etc.
- plates, cups, utensils, knives ... all sorts of kitchen gear
When I first got to my first acreage many years ago, I was very lucky to get a pickup truck load of stuff from a guy's garage. The widow of the guy just wanted it to all go. I'm trying to remember what all was there. About 50 buckets of nuts and bolts and etc. I remember there was a tap and die set I ended up using about 20 times. I remember lots of parts of things that must have been broken things the guy was trying to repair. There were so many odd bits and bobs that seemed like "junk" but in time all those weird things saved us a lot of trips to town.
We have a big shelf that is currently called "the free shelf." And we are going to expand this into the new
berm shed. The idea is to fully populate the free shelf. Plus add a bunch of stuff to allerton abbey for use by any/all of the
ants and gappers.
I suppose other things that might happen is:
- if a person is about to come here and they have room in their rig, they might ask
local permies if they have anything that they would like to send along.
- if a person puts together a big box or two, they could contact
uship.com and somebody that is already traveling from your area to missoula will trade bringing those boxes in exchange for a bit of gas money.
- if you happen to be at an estate sale, or a yard sale, or something, sometimes you can get 50 buckets of nuts and bolts for $5. Yay!
Okay, what all have I left out of these lists?
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