The best kind of trash-to-treasure story is when I can tell you that I just ripped a board off an old building and nailed it to my wall and called it art. Okay, so there was bubble wrap to buy (which went completely against my grain), ticket agents to be placated, planes to be boarded, several states to be flown over, luggage to be retrieved, so on and so forth, between the said ripping and said nailing, but let's not quibble, okay?
It went like this: my sister and brother-in-law
(seen here) and I were exploring a great old ghost town in Montana after a family reunion in July 2005 - Elkhorn Abandoned. I saw many things I would have like to save from the eventual ravages of weather and abandonment, but most were well beyond the patience of any ticket agent. Then I found this roof board on a low lying roof of some sort of old mill. I pulled it off pretty easily, but it was about 10 feet long, so my brother-in-law kindly stepped on it just so, shortening it to a manageable 6 feet. Next day, I flew out of Bozeman, back to the East coast, with the board safely stowed in the bellies of the planes. It eventually made it all the way to upstate New York, with its lovely lichen and rusty nails perfectly intact.
When I finally found just the right spot for it, I couldn't figure out how best to hang it, but then I noticed the hole just the right size for a rusty nail I retrieved from my basement. And so here we go - a great piece of trash-to-treasure art!
My sister Martha makes all sorts of great assemblage art pieces out of various kinds of found objects, scrounged materials, and recycled stuff. Her art is a little hard to describe, but Joseph Cornell's boxes come to mind as a comparison. Here is a little piece she made that I have and love. 
I think the scene in the background and on the back is The Flume, or at least I like to think so. She has a studio in her basement full of great materials for her art, lots of stuff that I covet.
Tons and tons of books on dvd. I haven't added it all up, but there is somewhere in the vicinity of 100 hours of books here. I am bowled over. I am driving to Athens, Ohio next week, so the timing is perfect. I mentioned my great good fortune to my friend Frank, and he said he'd like to borrow them when I'm done, so that will mean at least three people will use them. Then, unless I find someone else who wants to borrow them, I will pass them along to the Blaisdell Memorial Library. Let's keep as much as we can in circulation. Thanks Gwen!
I just love this lamp, made by Kathy Neustadt, a Boston area artist. It was back in the summer or fall of 2002 (I think), and my sister had put together a show with a group of fellow artists, whose work is related by their passion for working with found and rescued objects. Here's a site of a show they did a while back. Here are their biographies, including Kathy's. Anyway, I went to the opening and there was this lamp. I was there early to help set up, and so I was able to snag it up right away. I had recently adopted my dog, (who is certainly the best thing I ever recovered from the trash, if you can call being abandoned in a back yard being trashed, which certainly strikes me as fair), and I was in a bit of a canine-philic stage of life (which not everyone thinks I have come out of) so I was very excited by the dog tags being used for the fringe. 
Kathy had found them all when she rented a house from a former animal control officer in a small town in New Hampshire. The lamp shade is rescued from something else, and the shade has been fitted to a great old fifties lamp. I've had this lamp for all these years now, and I've always given it pride of place.
