A Ton of Cardboard and an Elevator
I found a bunch of 4' x 8' sheets of cardboard in a dumpster. They all looked to be in really nice condition, but they were just going to be thrown out with the rest of the dumpster contents.
I decided that I had to do something with them, so I got three friends together that night, and we got to work to collect the sheets. As we were pulling the sheets out of the dumpster, we began to realize that there was a lot more there than I had initially thought. We'd gotten over a hundred sheets out before a passing police officer informed us that dumpster diving was illegal. So we stopped there.
After that, we sorted out good quality sheets from the mangled sheets, which left us with about 90 sheets. It was actually fortunate that the officer did tell us to stop; otherwise we would have had an impossible time transporting any more than what we already had back to our dorm.
Also fortunate was that I thought to bring rope; since bundling up the package turned out to be quite convenient.
It's anyone's guess how much this solid block of cardboard weighed, but it must have been at least 400 pounds. The four of us grappled with a number of ways to carry it, but all turned out to be quite awkward and difficult. We got it about a hundred feet before we decided we really needed to reconsider how we were going to move this thing, knowing that we had to get it 0.8 miles across campus. That's when I remembered that I had some friends at the nearby Startup Shell who had a pair of small dollies. So we got those, and that made things quite easier.
The entire venture took more than three hours, but we made it back, and now it sits in the multipurpose room of our dorm, Queen Anne's Hall. I'm still not sure what we'll do with it all, but we're considering building a large castle outside when it gets warmer.
Until we do figure out that castle, we used five sheets to coat our building's elevator with to create an open canvas for public art. We were nervous that it might just ended up totally gratified with penises, but it's actually turned out pretty well. It's an interesting project, and it seems to be appreciated by just about everyone in the building.
