Are you wanting to start a business selling live bamboo? Cut bamboo poles? Or is the only option is to sell the removal rights to someone? I think your best bet is to search for bamboo farmers in your area, close by, to see if they wanted to harvest it. A long shot but they're the only ones I can think of who would have the know how and way of selling the product. I have no idea what kind of bamboo you have but you might not get much money, or any money, the harvester might even charge you. The savings would come from reduced removal cost. The value isn't so much in the standing bamboo, it's in a product. Creating that product is a serious investment.

Go to Home depot and get some BIX Stripper. Apply that to get the paint off the soapstone. Just follow the instructions and make sure your basement area has some air movement. Be generous with the stripper, slop it all over the sink, inside outside upsidedown. When cleaning it off, use lacquer thinner with steel wool, but not coarse steel wool. Once everything is dry sand it down with a random orbital sander with 150 grit sand paper. Or you may want to try a lower grit first. The old soapstone tends to be pretty soft so doing it dry will be doable. If you don't have a random orbital sander try a regular palm sander, but you will fight against little swirly marks when the sander gets clogged up with paint residue and random particles. Around the top take a block with the sand paper and round off the edges to make everything smoother. After years of abuse it will need some attention. Oh yeah it will take alot of time and effore, I hope your up for the challenge! !

My soapstone has been in for about 18 months now. You can have a lot of fun testing but in the end putting lemon, ketchup, wine, mustard are just messes to clean up. They won't teach you anything since soapstone will not stain. It just won't. It also won't etch like marble. It will ding, however so if you really want to test it, take a can of soup and let it slip form your hand. Or a large can of tomato sauce. That's one that would cause my blood to run cold, for sure. Drop your can opener on it. These will likely leave dings either large or small. Many dings don't just magically disappear with a quick oiling. Hand sanding is one method of getting rid of scratches, but if you have one of those salt&pepper soapstones that sort of looks spotted- you'd find that after a hand sanding, there would be an orange peel texture- not completely flat. This is because the softer spots wear away faster then harder spots when sanding. Of course, that orange peel texture itself will be sensuous and wonderful, but it won't be strictly flat. These are the real tests for soapstone. They'll answer whether the patina of soapstone is really for you. It's also fun to see how different treatments darken the stone. As another scientist on this forum, I will advise not to use olive oil. No it's not horrible to let it get on your counters. But to use it to oil them over a long period of time would potentially be a big mistake. I went 20 years with not dishwasher. My handwashing of my pots and pans focused more on the INSIDES. As consequence, the outsides have a sort of a glossy almost sticky deposit. This is 20 years of incomplete removal of olive oil. It's fine on the outside of my cherished pans, but not on my counter. It won't build up fast enough to notice. But once it's there, how do you plan to remove it?? it does not come of with a good washing, or even a tough scrub. Another scientist suggested that it is not even soluble in acetone, which would normally be the way to remove your dark coating on the soapstone slabs. Why use this gimmick when there are better options? I have a dark hard soapstone. After 18 months, I still have stuff left in my first tub of Bees Oil (Mineral oil plus beeswax) from William's sonoma. My counters have stayed dark for a really long time. I'm sure I only really oiled them for the first couple of months. After that, it's only when I want them to look especially pretty for guests. They always look gorgeous really, and never show rings or faded spots except perhaps under the espresso machine which has had fewer passes with the oil/wax. I keep the same cloth in a baggie and reuse it with no washing every time. It's ok since I wipe my counters before oiling. You need no special cleaners of any kind for soapstone- I clean with a warm wet cloth. Harsh soaps will remove more of the residual oil deposit and lead to white rings happening more often (like around a soap dispenser). Personally, I have a squirt dispenser of dishsoap on the counter. I keep it full of 1/4 strength dish soap, which is more environmentally friendly, lower cost, and certainly just effective as "ultra concentrated" soap. It also makes my soapstone look not quite so mangey where the soap dispenser sits. good luck!

DeDe, while there are some names that seem to be the same between soapstone companies and yards, some others create their own names for certain stones. It's hard to compare sometimes. You mentioned having spoken to someone from "the stone place." Please be careful! Soapstone is somewhat special; some granite fabricators claim to be able to handle soapstone, but I'd strongly recommend finding someone who specializes in soapstone if you decide to go that way. On hardness: the hardness is determined by the amount of talc in the stone, and generally, the greyer the stone the softer. Most of the dedicated soapstone companies (i.e., Dorado, Teixeira, Teresina, etc.) will send you samples. (I ordered 12x12ish remnants of the stones I was interested in and then actually worked on them to see how they would hold up against scratches, etc. Very glad I did, because it let me rule out some!) HTH