Scrap metal pickup in Gilles Plains, sorted the same day.

Scrap metal pickup in Gilles Plains, and what comes out of it

Gilles Plains sits eight minutes west of the yard, and we are through there most weeks on the Grand Junction Road run.

Gilles Plains was one of the suburbs the South Australian Housing Trust filled with prefabricated, imported timber houses between 1950 and 1954, when building materials and skilled labour were both in short supply after the war. Several thousand of those houses went up across Gilles Plains, Windsor Gardens, Hillcrest, Klemzig and Northfield. Gilles Plains High School was founded in 1960, at the point when the whole area was still a building site.

Seventy years on, those timber houses are the ones being renovated or replaced, and they give up a very particular mix: galvanised iron roofing, steel window frames, a copper hot water service and the old copper pipe that came with it. Imported prefab framing also means fewer surprises in the wall -- most of the metal is in the roof, the plumbing and the kitchen. The pace of that build still shows in the street layout. The local church congregation went from five people to forty between 1959 and 1961, and a high school was founded in 1960 to keep up, which tells you how fast the houses filled. Those same houses are now all hitting the same replacement cycle.

The Housing Trust streets here have wide verges and driveways you can actually back into, which makes Gilles Plains one of the easier suburbs we load in. If you are mid-renovation, stack the copper and the brass separately from the steel before we arrive. Ten minutes of sorting on the driveway is worth several dollars a kilo on the copper.

It is a straight run west along Grand Junction Road, so we can usually fit a Gilles Plains pickup in on the same day you call.