If you ever rent a dumpster for a home renovation or a big clean up project, then you need to know about what will inevitably happen. Dumpsters are notorious for getting filled with random junk from anonymous neighbours overnight. When people see a dumpster in front of someone else’s house, they just have to throw all their garbage into it. They just can’t help it. It’s a thing. It will happen and you can’t stop it.

“That won’t be a problem for me,” you scoff. “The dumpster that I’m going to rent has a lid with a lock.” I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it won’t help. People will still come with their bug infested mattresses and failed pallet-furniture projects sometime between midnight and 5 am, and when they find that the dumpster is lidded and locked, they’ll just lean these items against the dumpster for you to find in the morning. That is to say, they’ll lean their things against the dumpster if they’re in a charitable mood. It is more likely that they’ll toss their heavy garbage items on top of the lid, making it impossible for you to open it without moving them first.

The layperson who rents a dumpster is typically shocked and upset to find the dumpster that arrived the day before already filled in the morning. After all, they paid money to get this dumpster into their driveway because they had a specific use for it, and now they can’t put their specific rubbish in the dumpster because there is no longer enough room. Construction workers, on the other hand, are never surprised. It is well known in the construction industry that this is a thing. Usually construction companies allow for extra dumpsters in their budget when they have a project.

And how do I know about the dumpster thing? My husband works in demolition. One day he returned to a job downtown early in the morning and the dumpster was full of mannequins. Their neutral faces stared at him and past him and towards the bottom of the dumpster. Toeless feet pointed towards the sky, and thin, hard arms and legs jutted out everywhere like sticks in a broken bird’s nest.