Grrr. Rarr. Beware. I have tools.

The time is fast approaching where the dreaded “MOVING” word will begin showing up in my “what are you up to?” column. To prepare for that, I really needed to turn the trailer we got from Harbor Freight a few years ago and turn it into a box trailer. Last weekend I built sides for it, and a folding rear gate, and started loading all the garbage we had lying around into it for a run to the dump.
Now, because we’re in the burbs, getting rid of garbage that’s not normal kitchen waste and not recycling can be a pain in the butt. Fortunately, my brother in law pointed out a commercial garbage facility in Westborough called EL Harvey (warning, it has music on the home page) that, wonder of wonders, takes garbage. Any garbage.
So with Zach’s help I finished loading up the trailer, bungied down the tarp (EL Harvey requires all loads to be tarp covered), and headed over. The trailer held a mix of debris including old boxes that had gotten wet, old yard equipment, broken computers, etcetc. Judging by how the van was behaving, I guessed it was about a ton all told.
Once we got to the station, we lined up with all the big heavy duty trucks, weighed the van and the trailer together, and got directed to one of the buildings. We backed up the trailer, handed over our receipt, and started unloading. It was simply a matter of tossing everything over a low wall into the building, where a pair of big front loaders were shifting the junk around into various piles about 10′ below us. Unloading only took 10 minutes, after which we re-weighed the van and trailer, and paid for the dropoff. Because we were below a ton (about 1600lbs total), we still paid the ‘minimum’ amount ($55 for a ton), and headed off.
Zach and I stopped off on the way up to Burlington to visit Cat’s mom, and checked over the trailer to see how it held up to the garbage run. My sides and gate worked as advertised, and the trailer was happily rattling around empty for the drive up.
I still need to have a ratchet strap around the back to keep the sides together, unfortunately. The 1/4″ plywood siding isn’t rigid enough to keep straight up and still keep the rear gate closed. I may add some bracing on the sides, but really, for the first time out, everything worked just as I wanted.
We’ll be doing another garbage haul next weekend, and I’m sure the trailer will get tons of use once we start hauling things over to Mosaic in… amazingly enough… about 7 weeks.