To ask what's the best thing you have pulled out of a skip!!

[trevthecat]

Just that really, we have a skip on the drive and it's a constant stream of people rummaging! It's only got house renovation crap in it!

Once there was a skip outside a bar in town and I took a silver champagne ice bucket out! It's in my mums garden now with plants in!

So, what's the best thing you have pulled out of a stranger's skip?!

Love the allotment shed with all the different windows @BitOfFun

An old rocking horse. Knocked on the door with toddler DS to ask if we could have it. It has given him years of fun.

That shed is awesome

M&P buggy.

Frame was a bit wobbly but the fabrics were perfect, if grubby.

Stripped it down, washed them, bunged them on ebay, made £50!

People actually do that👀
Whenever I see skips they're always full of rubble etc :(

I literally climbed inside a skip to retrieve an old wooden architect's plane chest, which I then sold for £800!

Couple of years ago I sat in the doctor's car park waiting for DH. There was a stream of what I presume were DIYers coming along and removing perfectly good sheets of timber and other building materials from a skip in the car park. The surgery and pharmacy next door were having work done so I assume it was scrap. Good it didn't go to waste but looks like there'd been some seriously overestimation of the materials required given the volume in the skips.

12 huge bin bags packed full of children’s clothes, different ages, even including ski suits. It was about 14 years ago when my eldest DCs were still small, so all of that stuff has been used, passed down to the younger ones, and some now passed to others.

I've never seen anything decent in a skip. Years ago when I was a child my parents found a beautiful large cream rug in a skip. I'm not sure what it was but it was some sort or animal skin. Not sheep skin, closer to hair. I remember it being very soft and rolling around on it. My parents were convinced it was worth alot of money. Unfortunately we all started scratching. The rug was riddled with fleas and was sent straight back to the skip a few hours later.

A skeleton that we turned into a lamp. Not a real person. It was about 2 feet tall.

So, so much.
Very new looking, expensive branded hosepipe on its reel.

Little Tikes car

Various vases

Parrot cage

Jewellery

Compacts

Walking boots, still in box with price on £124.99

A few firepits/chimeneas

I deal in secondhand stuff as a second job, so brilliant finds, and all with permission.

Once my local pub was being refitted and the skip was full of those deep metal serving containers, 10s of dessert glasses, glass water jugs, serving utensils etc.
Those I donated to my local homeless shelter, who were over the moon.

Funny story - my ex dp and I were walking home from the pub one night very much worse for wear. I spotted a skip on our road and took a look.
Went home and to bed.

Woke up the next morning and went downstairs, opened the back door to let dog out for a wee, and saw, a broken kitchen stool, a commode minus it's bucket, some random bits of MDF, and a pile of rusty doorknobs I turned said to dp "where has all that shite come from?!!!!"

He replies "oh, I glad you agree it's shite, because last night when you had me lugging it all home, you kept telling me it was 'really cool stuff' " 😆

Obviously alcohol affects my judgement.

Decided we would wait until dark, then take it all back.
Which we did......to find the skip gone 😮

Had to take it all to the tip.

DH was working at the time on local housing and part of it involved the demolition of an old small police station on site.
One morning he went to visit and in the skip was the huge, bronze and enamel regional police crest that had been on the wall outside. He asked the relevant people who said yes, have it and put it in the car. This was 25 years ago and it remained in the back of the garage until recently as we had nowhere to put it.

It takes two of us to lift it. It’s on the wall in our hallway now. I did some research and it likely came from main HQ and would have been inside the building originally. I have no idea of it’s value but I suspect it’s a few quid.

My dh and his friend found a mahogany fire place. My dh restored it and we used it in two homes for 20 years.

Oh I love this thread!
I've never found anything in a skip, though I do always wander very slowly past them just in case.. much to my DH's judgement..

Is there a skip etiquette though?? I mean, I know it's stuff that's going to waste.. but should you knock on the door and ask first? For future reference incase I see anything

A bag full of barely alive kittens, some ( insert your own adjective) had put into my neighbour’s skip. I heard the mewing when popping bins out. 4 out of 5 survived and were found homes. My cat was VERY unimpressed at these high maintenance visitors who required hand feeding and her arch nemesis the VET visiting her space, she sulked on a dining room chair for the duration.

Best skip find though ....

@toria658 I wish I could say that surprised me that someone would do that but sadly it doesn't... did you keep them all?

Sorry just re read and see you said they were found homes, well done on taking them out of the skip though. They deserved a chance at life poor little things.

All we have is a coffee table.

But a few years ago, DHs work was closing down an overseas office. It would cost more to transport a lot of the furniture than to move it. So it was left by the skips for a bit unofficially before going in. DH had a 'shopping list'.

One guy got a piano!

Nintendo nes games and ghostbuster figures. This is going back at least 28 years.

The council use to put a massive skip out for the council flats near our house twice a year and all the kids would go skip diving for goodies!

@EndoplasmicReticulum

A vase in the shape of some celery with a face. Not a valuable item but it started me collecting other vegetable related vases with faces from car boots etc. which cheered my kitchen up.

Love it Not so much skips but people leave lovely things outside houses here because they don't want it anymore and know someone else will It's better than landfill and I love success stories 😃

Wicker conservatory set about 15 years ago, repainted and recovered. Wooden crates that we painted up and made into veg beds.

Wedgwood dinner set and casserole dishes.

Not from a skip but outside neighbour’s house I got a lovely wooden coat stand and one of those kneeling stools for the garden.

Love this thread and its tales of rescue and repurpose!

I was a skip-dipper as a kid in 1970s Sydney, when it was very uncool and showed you probably came from a very bad home. (I didn't. I was just ahead of my time.) I salvaged dregs of paint, tools, nails, fabric, books, a garden chair and old plant pots and turned a falling-down shed into a fabulous cubby-house.

Last week I was driving home when I saw three guys smashing up furniture with an axe and chucking the splinters in a skip. On the footpath stood a 1950s chest of drawers. "That'll be next," I thought in horror, so did a screeching U-turn. The guys were actually thrilled that someone wanted the chest, as they were clearing out their uncle's house and hated having to bin things they hadn't been able to sell. I got the chest, a new toaster and rice cooker and a genuine '50s Modernist stool. My lucky day, and what lucky timing.

27 packs of new roof insulation. It’s made my home very extra warm.
It was a skip outside a new hotel build and I talked to the builders at the time and they said it was excess and that it never gets collected up to move to another job so it was thrown.
Crazy waste if I’d not collected it