Ever pulled anything cool out of the trash? I was out walking the dogs late last night, which was trash night, and I saw one of these by the side of the road. The person had a Mercedes SLK convertible in the driveway and probably had no way to get it to Goodwill. I came back with my truck, took it home, and it works perfectly. Way better than the POS treadmill I had before.
Hey I got a free treadmill from a retirement home. Guy was going to throw it away and I offered to take it. The motor burned out on it eventually.
It's hard to justify ever spending much if anything on exercise equipment. There's always someone throwing or giving it away.
I got a PS2 controller from a bin once and a little bathroom cabinet. That's all. I've been given lots of cool stuff for free when people were having clear outs though.
At university I got two, 2-seater Marks and Spencer sofas'; this is when M&S still made decent furniture too. Some rugby playing hooray was throwing them out of the very exclusive home his parents rented for him while he was at University. I still lived at home but I wanted them for my room and they were fantastic..they couldn't have been more than 18 months old. Supposedly he got rid of them because they were too short to shag birds on; my mate at the time suggested since he only shagged kids they'd fit no problem and he thumped him, was kinda funny.
Neighbor was throwing out an Athlon XP 2000+ with a Geforce 4. I threw XBMC on it and it's fine as long as you stick to standard def.
I scored a free 24" S-PVA monitor tonight. It's a 2008 model but it looks brand new. It still had some of the packaging plastic on it. It also came with a 6 speaker sound bar. Probably sounds like crap but I'll check it out later. The guy that got rid of it upgraded to two 32" monitors.
Well it's a weird sounding story. A friend of mine had a desk and she wanted me to look at it to see if I wanted it. She was storing the desk at a friends house. This friend is currently working in Italy and is selling his house. When I got to the house she mentioned the owner had two monitors he wanted to give away. I said heck no I got enough crap monitors. I took a look at the desk and knew I didn't want it. Then I happened to see the monitors realized one was really nice. The other was off brand supper old 4:3. So I didn't get the desk but I got a free monitor instead. It cost $670 new in 2008 and probably worth $250 now. It's got PiP, touch controls, built in sound, 4 USB ports, VGA, DVI, S-video, RGB component, and a tilt, swivel, up/down, rotate stand. It also has the S-PVA panel which is nice. This made my week.
I just found a four burner stainless charbroil commercial series grill in the trash outside of a mansion while I was walking the dogs. Looks to be a $500 grill. I don't see anything obviously wrong with it other than that it's a little dirty. I'm guessing some rich douche didn't feel like cleaning it and tossed it to buy a new one. Which is fine brah, I've wanted a nice gas grill for awhile. Charcoal tastes great and all, but gas is just so much more convenient when you're cooking for a lot of people. I've seen so many dumbasses toss expensive gas grills when all they had to was clean the nozzles with a pin. The difference this time was that it was only three houses down from me, so it was easy to grab and take back to my house.
Be careful with that thing. A reporter managed to nearly roast herself alive with one of those not long ago. I'm not crazy about cooking with things that involve gases that can explode or burn me alive. Make sure the reason it was thrown out was not related to a malfunctioning gas valve or something of that nature.
My parents have had gas ones for a few years and have never blown themselves up. They got a 7 burner one a couple of years ago and the thing weighs a ton.
You Dad probably cooks a whole cow at one time. I have my grill hooked up to a natural gas line. It does freak me out a little as any Joe could turn the gas on and it would just run until it explodes and takes out the whole neighborhood. I really need to get a plumber over to the house and get me a new shut off valve.