An excellent way to
furnish an apartment.
When I was living in Cincinnati, I took my Toyota Previa to Muncie, Indiana to see a friend that had recently moved there. The weekend I visited, all the super-rich Ball State University kids had cleared out of town for the summer, carelessly leaving piles of treasure in the street for the garbage collectors. When I arrived in Muncie, Spencer was waiting on his front porch with a wicked gleam in his eye.
"Oh, good. You brought the van."
Spencer had been living in Muncie for two months but barely had two sticks of furniture in his lovely, falling apart, two-story victorian dollhouse of a punk rock dream home. Spencer, his friend Rich, and I piled into my van to remedy this situation and help clear the streets.
We had to return to this house to dump out booty not once, not twice, but three times before we decided we were finished.
Our total haul:
Five victorian living room lamps in varying heights and degrees of swirliness
Two brushed steel desk lamps
Two matching crushed velvet lime green paisley loveseats
One complementary velour armchair in lemon paisley
One complete black and beige striped lawn furniture set, including glass-topped table
One 4 foot tall antique milk can that my mother adores
One black and yellow dart board with five darts stuck in it
One very clean twin-sized bed frame in cherry (before this I'd been sleeping on a twin-sized mattress on the floor)
One 3-drawered dresser to match the bed frame
Two dorm-sized refrigerators
One computer printer that Spencer took apart and used for parts
One kitschy pair of plaster owls that Rich insisted were cool
This was a major reason that my nickname in Cincinnati was 'Ghetto Martha Stewart.'