Unreal

The RR-SCOOP Shade

Like it? It’s a metal shade/shelter I got on craigslist!

Actually, it’s an idea I got from something I saw while shopping at a place I found on craigslist.

The listing advertised “VERY cool old farm stuff” in nearby Norco and its photos supported that description (I was especially drawn to what looked like a giant rusted steel pipe with attractive vertical slashes all over it). I called the seller and made a date to come out … Arriving at the address, we found ourselves at a construction company with expansive acreage … intrigued, we drove in and met our guide, Mike, thinking we’d now check out the stuff. Wrong; he told us we’d be driving out to see it … We jumped back into the car and followed him down a curving dirt road and soon found ourselves at what seemed like a graveyard for gigantic trucks, earthmovers, and machinery and parts of every description: we’d found rusted-metal-junk nirvana! Our minds thoroughly boggled by the sheer size of almost everything (that pipe with the cool slashes in the listing? Two-stories tall!) I began to focus on the smaller — movable — items, piling up the junk I wanted to buy … so many cool things for the garden! Also cool: Mike shared our excitement over the stuff and we had fun imagining alternative uses for it. He was enjoying our company so much that he took us a way down the road to show us an enormous warehouse full of even more amazing things … sadly, after almost 2 hours, we had to end our visit. To determine my bill, Mike weighed each piece on a handy bathroom scale and I paid him the piddling sum of $12.90 for all of it! (Mike based his prices on the $80 they get per ton for salvage.) Amazing, fun and beyond budget-friendly, I found some fantastic things … But, back to the first picture:

Big rusty

The RR-SCOOP shade was inspired by an enormous room-sized rusty scoop/shovel we saw at Mike’s place (think of it fronting a humongous bulldozer, or maybe at the end of a monstrous crane’s arm) … I loved it, and how its rusted hulking shape would look perfect in both prehistoric and space-age settings. Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and came up with this conceptual rendering of how it might look if it were mine and I could do whatever I wanted with it …  Looks good, right? But then Photoshop has that effect. Reality is far less easygoing: to move this item to the Rancho would involve an 18-wheeled semi, a crane or two and maybe even a helicopter. So, I don’t think I’ll be getting it, just the helicopter rental would surely blow my budget … I plan to return to Mike’s place soon, there’re two pallets of 1/2-inch steel discs I have to get hold of. They’d look great tiling the surface of a concrete pad like the one the scoop shade’s sitting on in the first picture. That, I can afford.