Toronto bottle collectors are preparing for the upcoming 2013 Four Seasons Bottle Club Show and Sale on Sunday April 21st, at Oriole Community Centre-Arena, 2975 Don Mills Road, Toronto (south of Finch)

Bottle collectors from all across Canada usually make the trip to this national show to say hello to old friends and search for those hard-to-find missing pieces in their own collections. Its the game of their lives. Here are the Maitlands - a father and son team that collect rare dairy bottles. They tell family friends to go to estate sales and search basements, as that's where most of the best bottles on their table were discovered; they came from dark basements below old farm houses and usually from the most cluttered inaccessible corners...

But you can find old bottles and pottery on the other side of the wall too..

This basement waterproofing contractor below could be one one of the stars of the show this year if he agrees to bring all that he has found in 2012, more recent digs in 2013 have been even more spectacular.  He digs up bottles from under the ground on the other side of the basement wall, outside the home.

The basement waterproofing excavator has a hard job that is filled with back breaking work but also some wonderful rewards 

He finds antique bottles, coins, old tools and toys. Ask any relic hunter and they will tell you its smart to dig beside walls.  More often than not, small treasures collect beside foundation walls at the sides of houses and barns. That’s because the wall has been there for a long time, and it has always been handy for leaning against and sitting up against, and people's inverted pockets dump coins. Ask any archeologists and they will tell you that they find coins on both sides of a foundation wall with equal frequency.

Bottles are uncovered in privy pits which once existed near the sides of the house, especially in West End Toronto homes. Before there was indoor plumbing inside the house, its occupants had to come outside and use the latrines. So indeed whole families would take turns using outdoor facilities in the moring and night, and these deep pits were also the most commonly used trash cans for empty bottles and crocks.

Here's the proud excavtor showing off his best finds to the homeowner minutes after they were uncovered, a century after they were discarded. 

You can read more about the annual Toronto bottle show on Dumpdiggers blog.