Terry Robison doesn't look at the Lower Mainland the way a real-estate agent would. Million-dollar homes may be 10 a penny here, but West Vancouver, he says, is "awful, awful, awful". The West End rates highly because people there have "a very disposable income", and while the East Side ranks relatively low in terms of his favourite pursuit, it's otherwise his top pick, and where he now lives. Dundaravers and Amblesiders, calm down. Robison is slagging your heartland not for its setting or its architecture but for its lack of scavenging potential. It's a neighbourhood where even yard-sale finds are in good condition, he says, and perfection is emphatically not what Robison is after.

"I take stuff that's absolutely useless to other people and turn it into...stuff," he says in his kitchen/living room/studio. How else to describe the miscellaneous bits and pieces, usually bruised and banged-up, that he assembles into objects whose purpose, at first sight, is often hard to define? He brings out a long shallow box made of found copper and mounted on ornate legs. With its art-deco handle and elegant hinges, it's impressive enough to hold your great-grandfather's will or an alchemical recipe. "I was thinking remote controls," Robison says, adding that, barring the insets of lapis lazuli and malachite, everything came from the garbage.

Formal training doesn't exist for this profession; Robison is entirely self-taught. When he was growing up in Coburg, Ontario, he says, his mom was continually giving him hell for bringing home "stuff". Now, "it's just something I do," along with working with interior designers, building structures for gardens, and rebuilding a flower shop in Seattle, where he recycled salvaged wood into counters, fixtures, and floors.

Streets are not on Robison's scavenging beat: screwdriver and hammer in hand (so he can prize a perfectly good handle off an otherwise beaten-up suitcase), he zigzags through alleyways, rejecting anything that works and drawing the line at Dumpster-diving, except when he sees construction-site lumber. His most memorable score, found during the Georgian Court Hotel renovations, was also his most poignant. "Inside a Dumpster was a lady's entire life," he says--someone, he suspects, who passed her last days as a hotel resident. The photographs were too sodden, but he was able to rescue a clutch of mink stoles (still in their cleaning bags), which he sold, and a Bible, which he transformed into "something like this". He takes an ornate and heavy book from a shelf. Brass-bound, hinged to lie flat, and embellished with a cameo and bits of found jewellery, it could be from Merlin's cave or a prop from The Lord of the Rings . The brass was originally in a restaurant undergoing renovation, Robison says. "I've got sheets of it. Most times if you ask, people let you take [what you want]." The leather strap that ties around it was someone's belt.

Considering that he scours the back lanes with such vigour and frequency, his surroundings are amazingly tidy, with every last button and metal ivy leaf stored and organized. A two-kilo cookie tin now contains 10 times that weight of screws and nails. Metal film cans (he has at least 20) hold, picking one at random, a jumble of pins, beads, a metal acorn off a cuckoo clock, and a GM car key. He has cases and cases of tile from which he'll painstakingly chip the grouting.

As we talk, we drink from tall cylindrical vases; across the room metal goblets have been upended and made into wind chimes. It's a parallel Alice in Wonderverse where nothing is what it seems. Robison says objects themselves usually spark his imagination. A tiny window in a vintage door suggested a picture frame that, even chopped down, is still considerably more frame than picture, a piece of art in itself when he stripped away coats of paint till he came upon a streaked finish of aqua and cream. A busted marble lamp cried out to be reconfigured as a decorative "Olympic torch".

Having recently emerged from his box phase, he's now besotted with birdhouses. (Homes for chickadees are $50 and up. A box for remotes is around $200. He sells his work through Point in Time [1302 Victoria Drive] and occasionally makes pieces to order. Contact him at 604-255-0360.) There are heart-shaped birdhouses and a birdhouse made of scraps of wallpaper, a piece from a lamp, and waste lumber, all salvaged from a place he's been renovating. Robison sees birdhouse potential in everything, even an elderly coffeepot, polished till it shines, a sleek modern residence for an urban chickadee.

Up near the ceiling, suspended from bicycle hooks, is an old "thing" for pulling log booms and ancient branch trimmers from which hangs what anyone else would describe as a stringless squash racquet. Not to Robison. He already has it earmarked as being strictly for the birds.