The Tinkers, Junk Trucks of Chicago

A Chicago junk truck
Photo by kristen60647

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor.
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief...

I've mentioned the tinkers a couple of times in my posts without really elaborating on them, but they serve such a vital service to the Chicagoland area that they deserve a post all their own.

People usually refer to them as "the junk trucks." When I lived in Uptown Chicago, we'd see the ancient pickup trucks--loaded with an assortment of old air conditioners, beat-up shopping carts, and miscellaneous scrap metal--parked all up and down Lawrence and Broadway at night. Neighbors would often complain about them, because, let's face it, they're pretty much an eyesore. But what would we do without them?

Every day will find these trucks prowling up and down the alleys of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, looking for scrap metal and other valuables to sell to recycling centers. I started calling them "tinkers" as a nod to the metalsmiths of old who traveled the countryside, fixing and selling metal goods, and the Irish traveling people I encountered on my first trip to Ireland in '98, who were often referred to as tinkers. I don't know of anyone else who actually calls these junk truck drivers "tinkers" except me.

Like many communities, ours charges a special pick-up fee for large-item pickups--which includes furniture, appliances, etc. But it never really comes down to that. Leave anything of value in the alley, and chances are a junk truck will stop and haul your item away. We had so much crap left behind by the previous owners, that we've come to rely on the tinkers to help us out. They've hauled away old metal tables, broken aluminum windows, a washer/dryer set, and miscellaneous, unidentifiable bits of scrap metal. The city would have charged us hundreds of dollars for these pickups. The quickest pickup I witnessed was five minutes. Nothing has sat in the alley for more than two days. Why oh why would I ever complain if one of my junk-collecting neighbors wanted to park his crappy-looking truck in front of his own house? They've saved me money time and time again, and in this economy, every bit helps.

So "God bless the tinkers," I always say. What would we do without them?

Forearm Forklift Wins Again

I know I've sung the praises of this product before, but seriously, the Forearm Forklift rocks.

The previous owners of The Box House left us with two washing machines and two dryers in the basement--appliances that are almost as old as I am, I kid you not (we have the original manuals). And while we do allow the tenants use of the laundry room, we still don't need four big, clunky appliances in the basement. There are no kids in the building, no dirty diapers to wash, just five adults with an average amount of laundry.

We'd like to use some of the space in the laundry room to add other big, clunky appliances, like a second refrigerator. So, this weekend Ted and I removed one set. All right, I admit the old Kenmore washer was more than I could handle, even with the Forearm Forklift. I'm a mere 5'1", and while pretty strong, if I do say so myself—after all, Ted and I moved ourselves because we were too cheap to hire movers—I met my match with the washing machine. We had to remove part of the motor and the concrete ballast (I had absolutely no clue there even was a big ol' chunk of concrete in the machine) before I was able to help Ted lift it. But the dryer we were able to lift and carry out with ease. No neck strain, no back pain. Just some tension on the forearms--which are far tougher than you'd imagine--and both the machines were up the stairs, out the door, and beside the driveway in (almost) no time. We would never have been able to budge them without the use of the moving straps. We just tilted each machine enough to slip the straps under them, then slipped our arms through the loops, squatted down to take the weight with our legs, and up we went. It wasn't fun, mind you. The machines are still heavy. But we didn't kill ourselves moving them.

Image from the package showing two models carrying a dryer. We did not look this good moving ours.

We left the machines in the alley, and they were gone by the next morning, taken by the tinkers. God bless those tinkers, who are always there to take our scrap metal and other interesting garbage.

Really, if you're about to move, or move something heavy, get this product. It just might keep you from getting a hernia.

Clap On! Clap Off! Clap On, Clap Off -- The Clapper

Jeez, I didn't even know The Clapper still existed. I wanted one desperately when I was a kid, but my parents wouldn't get any for the house. But this afternoon, while rummaging in the ice box in the downstairs unit, I found a box of assorted light bulbs and not one, but two Clappers! They look new. No one else seemed to share my glee, however, because we also have to deal with this:
We've been at The Box House for almost three weeks now, and we've spent the majority of our free time when we'd like to be working on the house doing clean-up chores instead. The Previous Owners left so much stuff behind, despite assurances from their agent that it would be gone. The tub shows a small selection of what was inside just one icebox--not all of it would fit. That's the icebox below. Each unit has one in the pantry.

A few of the things we're finding are, admittedly, kinda neat and I'll feature them in upcoming blog posts. But most of it is just junk, but not junk I feel comfortable throwing away. (I know I'm driving both Ted and my mom crazy with my constant, "Wait! Don't throw that away! Someone will take it!") In this most recent haul there's a perfectly good but rather fugly phone, a bottle of white shoe polish, a coffee can of miscellaneous screws, and at least half a dozen bottles of some rather unpleasant-smelling upholstery cleaner. I think we'll have to have a garage sale to try to rehome it all. For now, all of this junk is making its way to the garage to be dealt with later, and a little of it makes its way out of here each week via Craigslist.

Now, with some more shelves and cabinets cleared out, we can fill them with important things:


Venison dog food? Really? I know, I know. Maggie is completely spoiled. She'd tell you so herself, but her face is stuffed at the moment.

Craigslist Giveaway

After reading how Jennifer at Tiny Old House traded her washer and dryer through Craigslist, I thought I'd use the Web site to try to get rid of some of the junk left behind by the previous owners. So I posted this TV stand. We had specifically mentioned it on the list of stuff we didn't want to see left in the house after we closed, and it made it as far as the back porch but not all the way out. Grrr.

Although covered in dust, it's in decent enough shape. We just can't use it, don't want it, and don't want to throw it away. So I listed it under free stuff and put it outside by the garage, declaring "first come, first served." Within five minutes, I had eight e-mail inquiries, and within an hour, someone pulled up and took it away. Craigslist so rocks.

I Don't Like Spiders and Snakes, a Basement Adventure

I don't like spiders and snakes
and that ain't what it takes to love me
you fool, you fool.
I don't like spiders and snakes
and that ain't what it takes to love me
like I want to be loved by you...

I've had this song, Spiders and Snakes, going through my head all day. It's from Jim Stafford's self-titled album, one of my all-time favorite cassettes growing up--yes, I'm old enough to remember cassettes. Actually, it was my mom's tape, and I swiped it from her when I left for college. It was great roadtripping music between Chicago and Iowa City, where I attended university.

I don't really mind snakes or spiders. Spider egg sacs, however, I can do without. Particularly when they're in my house. Lest you think we've been slacking this week while the contractors sand and refinish the floors, rest assured we've been hard at work clearing out the basement of junk, sweeping, and sorting through the items left by the previous owners. We've put in two full work days so far. (The highlight of this week's Basement Finds: A box of underwear, including boxers, granny pants, long johns, etc. Ted threw it away before I could take a photo. But really, who out there wants to see a box of old underwear? I don't have to chronicle everything.)

So. Spiders. While I only spotted one live spider and a half-dead moth, there where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of egg sacs surrounding each window and piled in the corners. I don't know if these are all from this year, just waiting for spring to inundate us, but I took no chances. With our handy dandy (actually, it's a bit of a junker) shop vac, I vacuumed the bulk of them up, returning with a broom and rainbow-colored dust grabber to get the rest. Eeew. Our basement has two boiler rooms (one for each flat), three separate storage/bedroom/office rooms (not sure what we'll use them for yet), a laundry room, an under-the-stairs storage area, and a main, general-purpose room. All but the under-the-stairs room have windows. That's a lot of spider eggs. I feel like I wiped out an entire civilization from our basement, a spider armageddon.

Lucky for us, today was trash day, and we were able to clear several bags of assorted basement junk all the way out of The Box House, to the curb, and away. However, not everything can be dealt with immediately. There are old glass table tops, half-used paint cans, nearly-empty-but-not-quite cans of twenty-year-old spray starch, and a host of other things that I need to contact the city about for the means of proper disposal. All in all, we can only get one car in the garage at present because the other half is being used as a staging area for this stuff. I'd like to recycle, donate, or reuse as much of the stuff as possible and keep it from the landfill, but it's not going to be easy.

So yes, we've been busy dejunkifying.

I was going to bore you all with more pictures of how the floors have been coming along, but unfortunately we've been locked out of our own house for the evening. We ran a few errands this afternoon, and came back to find that the contractors had used the chains to lock all the porch doors. We didn't plan on sleeping at The Box House because of all the fumes from the stain and the still-lingering dust clouds, but I did want to stand in the kitchens, which are accessible from the back porches, and survey the overall progress. We can't go up the front stairs tonight because the stairs themselves have been stained today. I was told in no uncertain terms "no walk floor" by one of the work crew, about the extent of our communication. (Only the project manager, who wasn't there today, is easy to talk with.) It's no big deal, really, but it is slighty funny in a frustrating way to be locked out.

Floor pictures will have to wait.

Basement Blues

"Toss? Save? Who Decides?" Apparently, I do.

One of our top-of-the-list tasks is to clear out the basement, which we started to do last night. The previous owner of the Box House, a 94-year-old woman, had passed away last year, and we purchased it from her four children. Despite promises to have everything removed before we closed, they left us with an assortment of odds and ends to deal with—some of it pretty freakin' heavy, too. It will probably take a dumpster to get it all out. Here are some highlights:

Half a dozen boxes of Letters, Christmas Cards, Birthday Cards, Birth Announcements, Easter Cards, Graduation Programs, Wedding Invitations, etc., all of it spanning back 60 years, four generations of a family's milestones. I thought briefly of keeping it all, but it seemed too voyeuristic, too personal. Almost like reading someone's diary.

Instead, I flipped quickly through the boxes to see if there was anything specifically house-related, and then bundled up the rest for recycling. It made me kind of sad that the woman's family didn't want any of this stuff. It made me kind of cranky that I have to make angst-filled decisions regarding another person's ephemera collection.

A badly peeling cedar chest. The veneer on the top is all lifted. Is it worth restoring? I don't know. The interior smells good.

A dresser. After being told everyone in the family wanted to keep this piece for themselves, it turns out that nobody wanted it badly enough to actually remove it from the basement. Like the cedar chest, it's in very rough shape, with a fair amount of veneer loss. Still, maybe we'll keep it in the tool room or something for extra storage. I don't quite have the heart to throw it away. (However, the half bag of cat litter next to the dresser may come in handy when we go kitten-hunting in the next month or so.)

A trashcan filled with gosh-knows-what. It looks like bits and pieces of some kind of ceramic. Does it contain asbestos? Probably. Ted said it somehow reminded him of his mother's kiln from her pottery days.


A seventies-style jumpsuit? Cold War era protection gear? It was one of the only things left in the dresser, besides a ratty-looking stuffed dog and silver-plated salt-and-pepper shakers, souvenirs from someone's vacation to Arizona.

All in all, there is a fair amount of stuff to either haul away, sneak into someone else's dumpster, or set aside for future restoration—all of which must be decided upon before we get the rest of our stuff out of storage and into the Box House.