Work table wired up for power

October 21, 2025

I’m a scrounge. I can’t help but peek over the edge of dumpsters and I’ve occasionally jumped in to retrieve something useful. Tossing some power strips, cords, pieces of wood? I have buckets for them.

I have a work table in the basement that was someone’s dining room table once. Found just the top, no legs, at the recycle place next to the dumpster. Obviously the recycle place wasn’t going to recycle it, but i convinced my friend to put it in his car (“you’re taking it with you, right?”) and it sat against the wall in the basement for a bit. Cleaned it up as best as I could, there was some paint that didn’t come off well, so someone else had been using it as a craft table before it came to me.

Made some legs out of 2x4’s (salvage of course) glued into sturdy 4x4’s, cut the notch in the corner so it fit, got some bolts, put some wheels on the bottoms of the legs and made a table that is chest height. I’ve been using it for working on some computer stuff, my housemate uses it to fold his clothes, it’s the perfect height for him as he is well over 6’ tall (that’s 1.8m for some of you).

A friend broke down his shop recently and I got some long power strips that had been bolted to the wall. Cut them down with an angle grinder and now the table has outlets that aren’t hanging underneath it. There’s a little bit of wire at the end, if a power box comes free, i’ll add a couple more and maybe a switch for some of the outlets. Screws were found in one of the cat litter buckets that are organized by kinds of things (monitor cables, screws, ethernet cables, a few routers that I’ve rescued, etc).

I think i’m going to set up some of the routers with funny wifi names that i can just plug in for people looking for wifi to find. Don’t even need them to connect to internet, really.

Another friend needed a piece of plywood for something in his apartment, so I have been removing staples from some crates that I rescued. 1/2”, some 3/4” plywood - that shit’s expensive now! I’d been carefully avoiding the protruding staples, but since someone needed some, I got working on them. It turned out they were much easier to remove than I expected.

I’m a scrounge, some might say hoarder-adjacent or worse, but I love being able to do a project with just stuff i have laying around. My housemate is endlessly indulgent. He says it’s entertaining to see what I come up with, experiments, projects. One day he came into the garage and asked “so what are we building today?”

Picture of work table.

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