They went through my skip!

[IncognitoUsername]

Is this a thing? We have a skip outside as we have been doing some decorating/clearing out. I heard a van outside the house which seemed to have stopped so I looked out and two blokes were rummaging in the skip! I went downstairs to ask what they were doing but they had just left. I noticed some metal items had gone out of the skip.
Is this normal? Do people just drive round looking for skips to have a nose in? I’m not bothered by them taking stuff out but surely it would have been polite to ask?!

Agreed. I would find it much more annoying if everyone who wanted to rummage knocked and asked. If i's in a skip I obviously don't want it any more so if you do then help yourself.

Someone took a defunct Dyson from ours late one night. We watched him do it on the ring doorbell. Cheeky sod!

Maybe he got it going again, saving it from landfill or whatever, who knows.

Was hilarious though, the way he sidled up to the skip 😁

If you ask people then it is perfectly fine.

She means nesting tables, nest of tables. Three tables that are small, medium and large and stack together.

Metal has a value.

Anything that could be used still could be offered on marketplace but the sheer number of jokers would drive you mad.

Round here they normally knock and ask or at least do a quizzical 'can I?' face when I look out the window at them and then a thumbs up when I indicate crack on.

That house is incredible - not my taste but an absolute work of art 😳🥰

They are weighing in the metal, put the other table beside the skip and they might have it too

Yes it's a thing. Scrap metal gets put in skips. Why would they ask if it's already being dumped anyway? Bit like putting your rubbish in a street bin then expecting the council to ask if they can collect your contribution. You've already thrown it once it's in the skip. There's money in other people's rubbish, that's why they do it.

I’d be actively delighted if someone took stuff out of my skip, leaving me more space for stuff I’m throwing away.

They do it round my way also. They also go a but further than the skip though and have a good nosey around the front gardens in general- anything not nailed down is fair game to them which makes me rather cross the robbing gits.

If its in my skip and they'd like it I'm happy for them to take it but just bloody ask and don't take anything that's not in the skip!

No she doesn't. She means a table for basting turkeys on.

I’d be delighted about this and let them crack on.

When we were having our bathrooms done a cheeky bastard came into my garage, having rummaged the skip, and was eyeing the metal we had set aside. He did ask in fairness, but he was actually very intimidating. Fortunately I called the plumbing guys down and they told him to go. The skip was on my drive too, and he had just walked up.

We leave bits and pieces on the boundary for anyone to pick up, and it always goes, great BUT as above, no-one should come up the drive and help themselves without asking.

It's skip currency. You need space in a skip - hell, they cost enough to have them - so you can get rid of as much crap as you can. If someone takes something out, you can fit more in. Everyone wins!

That house is incredible - not my taste but an absolute work of art 😳🥰

I love it!

Sometimes we have had people knock and ask, others we've been out and sometimes they just take it. If I saw something in a skip I wanted I'd ask. Though the situation has never come up!

To the poster who mentioned calling the police??? Complete overreaction

Could be worse. Where I used to live people would be far more likely to fill your skip full of their rubbish.

It’s win win, you get more room and the items get recycled instead of dumped

I think it's fine - it's all junk to you if you've put it outside. Completely agree that people putting stuff in is really out of order.

I think its more immoral to be skipping usable stuff really. Your tables... were they damaged for example?

When I lived abroad the etiquette was stuff like that went next to the skip. Thats where my coffee table came from!

The solution to it is to make councils licence street scrap collection. Then you have one licenced collector per area. There is no pressure to collect and if stuff does start to go missing then the police know who to "have a word" with. The licenced collector will also "have a word" with the unlicenced collectors operating on their patch.

The problem comes when you get multiple collectors sharking round an area for stuff. Then collectors get aggressive because their argument is that if they don't take the stuff someone else will. So stuff that is, how shall we say, more marginal in terms of whether the owner wants it removed or not tends to be taken before someone else has it away.

I had a skip for 4 days and had loads of visitors. One old man stopped on his bike on day one and came back with a little trolley the next day.

We were clearing old house items from my parents, a lot of them were damaged by water.

Only one person knocked and asked. A few people only accessed it from the main footpath until I told them they were fine to come on the driveway and rummage around. The scrap metal men just brazenly stopped, left the engine running, started throwing things about (still in the skip) and then sped off as fast as possible.

We were filling a skip last summer. Some things didn't make it as far as the skip! We were delighted.

I tend to leave any metal items out by the side of the skip to save them having to rummage around in rubbish. The amount of perfectly useable stuff getting skipped is ridiculous. A neighbour of mine currently has about 15 decent sized plant pots in his, why pay 100s of pounds to get rid of something perfectly useable? Madness!