Today I went and rented a trailer, and backed it into the back yard, and hauled that old stove out of the garage.
Almost as soon as I moved it, it started coming apart. First I cleared it off, then dragged it forward; and when I went to drag it towards the door, crink a piece came off in my hands. The top of the thing was in pieces already; it had broken in several places. At least one of the doors was missing. It was far too heavy to move in one piece, so I began disassembling it, eventually getting it down to a core unit which I gently tipped over onto a furniture dolly. That broke the base in the process, but it was already obvious that this stove had very little structural integrity.
Got the core onto the trailer. Got the other pieces in. Lugged it down to the junkyard; and when I went to push it off, the core part had sagged and split and opened, so that it was no longer square.
Heaved it off the trailer, swept the trailer clean, got my empty weight and got paid.
480 lbs of scrap iron, $43.01.
My late sister had wanted this stove, but with her demise, there wasn't anyone who wanted it--and even if there had been, that pile of brittle, rusty metal wouldn't have survived shipping. Not unless someone had been willing to carefully disassemble the thing and crate each piece individually--and I sure as hell wasn't going to do that. And if I didn't, no one else was going to. So, screw it.
But with that, I have finally rid the garage of something utterly useless that's clogged it since 1987 at least. Thirty years have passed since that useless lump was put there, and now it's gone, and I have that much more floor space reclaimed.
I didn't get the rest of the recycling out. It had been threatening rain all day, and I just wanted to get this done, and I'd rented the trailer--so I got it done. The rest of the recycling I can do by putting down the Jeep's back seat. I'll do that next week.
It cost me $27 to rent the trailer, so I came out $16 ahead. Woohoo.