We hope for everyone. But there is one person for whom 2019 can no longer break. Just a long story short: First look through the door. What do we see then? No southern France or Spanish plateau. We see solid, Dutch thirties construction. So in terms of location it could be around your corner.
The building was an old company building
It was used for decades as a - sometimes somewhat shadowy - work and storage place. Then the municipality started with changes to zoning plans and the ramshackle building complex was bought by the municipality. And then the recent buyer of a bunch of old cars had the happiness of a lifetime.
We don't faint about it, but the municipal officials found a lot of abandoned stuff in two of the halls. Nothing could be found about this from the paper chaos at the time of the takeover. The uninterested civil servant who had to deliver the site for demolition was called a local car demolition asking if he could dispose of a set of old car wrecks. The car breaker liked to do that. He asked how many cars it was. "About thirty".
The sloper decided to take a look and was surprised.
He decided to change his approach. He took photos and went to a friendly classic dealer. He bought the entire batch unseen and promised to take care of the removal. The demolitioner thought he had done the best deal of his life.
The classic specialist was also not dissatisfied. A couple of the cars found were just too bad to save, but still had donor capacities. But the desolate wreck of a VW Kübelwagen went to America the same week for $ 20.000. Simply: because the numbers were correct.
Find old iron
The last hot, dry summer we saw many people with metal detectors searching for things from the Second World War. It was warned that many of those things could explode.
Our approach for 2019 is - no matter how the summer gets - different. We are also going to look for scrap iron. We are going on a classic hunt. Just here in the Netherlands. We have already discovered so much in Groningen, in Zeeuws Vlaanderen, but also in the full Randstad metropolitan area, that we are becoming increasingly curious.
Talk to the locals
The luck lies in the search in corners where not everyone 24on 24 is sitting behind a screen. Spending an afternoon or evening in a village pub can lead to very interesting results. The visitors to the pub are often elderly people who have been living in the region for generations. They know a lot. And if you have won their trust, they want to share that knowledge, very modernly, with you.
A certain allergy to Westerners
Be calm and modest in such investigations. It is surprising how nervous many people from outside the Randstad respond to smooth, noisy and in their eyes annoyingly self-conscious Randstad residents.
Another tip: In the field of classic motorcycles, we have already made a few nice discoveries ourselves after a call in local or regional newspapers. Those things are spelled quite en masse by older villagers. And then it is surprising that they suddenly start thinking about that thing that has been in the shed for decades.
But it works! A company recently wrote that in an advertisement. And the social media exploded!
Surprisingly ... do they set it on fire? 🙂