How I Made $150 Trash Picking

The table in the clip above is similar to the one I'm talking about in this post, except the one I found had much more intricate carving. 

Back in 2006, I could tell that taxi driving was going to keep going downhill as a business, so I tried to escape it.  I had discovered storage unit auctions by accident a couple years before.  This was a while before the TV shows about storage auctions came out.  Oddly, I started in Huntington Beach, California, and I think Daryl who now stars in Storage Wars, was at the first auction I went to.

In any case, I was living in my taxi, and had my own stuff in a storage unit.  I started going to storage auctions and buying the cheaper units, and reselling things, making a bit of money.  One day, driving into my own unit, I passed the dumpster, and there was a big, round table top, and a huge table base nearby.  I didn't think much of it.  The next day, I went to my unit again, and I could tell the table was old, so I checked it out.  It was solid oak, definitely antique, with lots of hand carved details.  But there was some damage to it.  I threw the table top in the back seat, lugged the insanely heavy base into the trunk, and took it from the dumpster to my unit.  I happened to have a disposable camera so I took a few photos and got them developed.

Over the next few days, in the course of driving around in my taxi, I stopped at several antique shops to see what they thought.  The crazy heavy table I found in the trash was solid oak, made in France, and probably made around 1870-1880.  after about three days, a store owner said he'd give me $300 for it.  So I went to my storage unit, loaded it up, and took it to his huge antique shop.  when he saw it, he said, "That's a lot smaller than I thought it was, I'll give you $150."  A lot of people may have been  pissed off.  But I pulled it out of the trash three days earlier, I took the $150 cash and headed back out on the road as a taxi driver.

How did I spot it?  I worked for years as a furniture mover, and I got to know good furniture from bad, so it caught my eye sitting there by the dumpster.  You never know where a good piece will be found.  A lot of people put old furniture out by the dumpster or on the curb.  Like the old saying goes, one person's trash is another person's cash.  Keep an eye out.