The Most Expensive Trip to the Dump. Is It Treasure or Trash?

I simple must tell you this, almost unbelievable, but true story that involves a recent trip to our local landfill site.

(Yes, I am about to tell you about what happened at the dump.)

First, let me set the stage properly for you so that you'll really appreciate how things generally tend to work in our household.

@knarly327 and I have been married for over 25 years. We chose not to have children and as a result the two of us pretty much are free to do what we want with our spare time. Each of us have multiple interests and multiple hobbies that challenge both sides of our brains and if we don't know how to do something, we just research the topic, figure it out and teach ourselves the new skills we want to acquire.

Professionally, we both possess multiple trade tickets and certifications. We generally don't let fear of the unknown hold us back. In our history, we have renovated multiple houses from top to bottom. We've tackling everything from roofing, to electrical to plumbing and even septic systems. We've both sold and purchased real estate on our own, too, without using an agent to help us.

As we have been fairly industrious over the years and appreciate living minimalistically. Going to the dump is a fairly regular occurrence and is something that we do a few times a year, in an effort to purge what we can't recycle.

Normally when people go to the dump, they deposit waste material that they no longer want anymore. The concept of going to a dump is to rid yourself of material objects that no longer serve a purpose. Or, objects that are broken beyond repair.

MOST PEOPLE DON'T GO TO THE DUMP AND BRING STUFF HOME.

Unless you're like my husband...then all bets are off. 

A few days ago, this was the scenario, we are currently renovating our house and as a result, we had a full trailer-load of garbage and scrap material that couldn't be recycled and it needed to be hauled off to the dump.

This is usually a task that @knarly327 really enjoys. Secretly I know he looks forward to it and he always reports feeling much better psychologically when the job is completed because our space is tidier and not cluttered.

Dumps are high-tech places now. If you've never been, you drive onto a huge weigh-scale when you first arrive. Then you dump what you've brought in the appropriate designated area. When you are finished, you simply return in your vehicle back to the scale and are weighed again. Your total bill is calculated based on the difference between your "before and after weight".

In our particular case, the trailer-load cost us approximately $40 to dispose of its contents...but that's just where the story starts to get really juicy. While sorting and depositing our waste, @knarly327 spied a "gaming computer" sitting in the "scrap metal" designated area. It had been discarded in the wrong pile of waste. He can't help himself when he finds mechanical and technical equipment that's been thrown away. It's like it seductively calls out to him in a sultry voice, "fix me..." " You know you can..."

It turns out he found a gem. It's a custom-built gaming computer!

CPU - Quad Core 4th gen i5-4570 3.2 GHZ

Mother Bord - Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H

Video Card - Zotac GTX770 4GB 256BIT DDR5

Ram - Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB)

Power Supply - Corsair CX750M

No Hard Drive and the side panels on the case were missing.  

While at the dump, the first thing that caught his eye was the power-supply. He's been after one to power a Turnigy battery charger so that he can charge 18650 batteries. (They're the kind used in laptops.)

When he looked at it closer he realized it was a custom built gaming computer loaded with lots of good components. So, into the car it went and to our house it arrived.

On closer inspection, he found that it needed a hard drive. So, he put a spare hard drive we had laying around, in it. Then he was going to load windows 7 onto the hard drive, when he realized that the video card fans weren't working. So, he took the video card out and plugged the monitor into the video card on the mother board and continued to load windows to make sure everything else was functioning.

Everything checked out fine and it functioned properly so he decided to resurrect it, instead of using it for parts.

This meant we needed to drive to Kingston, Ontario (which is about a 90 minute drive from our house) so that we could go to a computer supply store, called Canada Computers.

They've been in business since 1991 and they are usually really well stocked and their prices are competitive.

To bring it back to life, the computer needed a case, proper heat sink and fan plus, replacement fans for the video card.

 All of this component buying prompted a splurge on a 120 gig SSD hard drive and a copy of Fall-Out 4.

@knarly327 always wanted to play Fall-Out 4, but he just never had a fast enough computer to do so until he went to the dump!

I must say that we had the most enjoyable lunch out of the whole deal too, as part of our day-trip to Kingston.

I welcome your comments and I invite you to follow me on my journey.

~ Rebecca Ryan