Nothing Happens At Ten 2010

House From Hole

That is what we are going to do next... pull a house from this hole... and it is a magnificent hole!

The excavation crew finished digging the foundation hole today. Look at that beautiful hole! It's huge! Here it is from the other end.

That thing sticking up in the middle is where the garage floor will go. We went down into the hole. Here is where the front door will be.

My shop will be in the basement in that corner, and the front door will look out on the tree.

And the best part.... no ledge.... there was no ledge anywhere! It doesn't get any better than that.

Demolition

Today we took down the house. The equipment showed up on Monday to pull out the stumps, and it was waiting for the Big Event Tuesday morning.

So, where do you start demolishing a house? How about the front door?

One chomp and the door is gone! This is powerful stuff.

Then, you keep chomping until you cut the house in half.

And eventually, the roof caves in.

The big guy keeps eating away at the center of the house while the little guy takes down the garage, on the left

 The garage is gone, and the South side of the house is next.

When they meet up, there isn't much left standing but the French doors and some trim.

Two hours later the house has been turned into a pile of rubble.

Pack it into the biggest truck ever.

Then drive it off to Maine where they will grind it up into "Hog Food" to be burned in a power plant.

Goodbye, House From Hell (HFH). It's enough to bring you to tears.... not because the house is gone, but because the lot looks so gorgeous with the house gone.

Stay tuned. I will try to post videos later.

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the day when the House From Hell (HFH) goes down!

7:00 a.m.

Stay tuned.

Podzilla

Today the PODS people showed up with their PODZILLA and took away our stored stuff. The PODZILLA is quite entertaining to watch.

First, they drove the PODZILLA up the drive and around the POD.

Then, the PODZILLA picked up the POD and the drove it into the street.

Once it was in the street, the PODZILLA lifted the POD up high, and they backed the truck underneath it.

Once on the truck, the PODZILLA wheels were lifted, and the whole thing was driven off. It is an ingenious system.

Trees

The trees came down yesterday. What a show! Here is a photo of the front of the house before we took out the trees:

That large tree by the sidewalk had to come out because the new house will be built right on top of it. There were four other trees that had to go, including the two at the right side of the photo, the one in the center by the street, and one tree in back. The tree by the walk is a monster. Look at the size of this thing:

Here's the trunk of it sitting on the ground after they took it down:

The tree was starting to rot in the middle, as you can see by the hole in the base. The rot goes right through the stump and into the roots too.

They had to haul the big tree out on a truck, but the "little" trees got fed directly into the chipper.

The chipper ate a whole tree!

I went back later to see just how big the monster tree was. Here is the stump.

You can see the rotten hole in it. I put the tape measure across the stump to see how big it was:

You have to add 3 inches to that for the length of the tape measure body. Almost 5 1/2 feet. And that isn't even the widest part.

We Are Out!

We are out of the house. We went through 100% of everything we own and put it into one of three places:

1. This apartment
2. The POD
3. The trash

We started moving on June 15th after we signed the lease on the apartment. It is now August 1st and we are out. It took a month and a half to go through 38 years of stuff.

We are all beyond exhausted.

Asbestos

They took up the floors yesterday. The asbestos is gone. It is amazing how nasty the house looks without the floors. Check it out.

If you look closely, you can just barely see the awesome tire track that I showed you earlier in the lower left corner. You can also see in the foreground the 2 by 4 buried in the slab. We now can see many 2 by 4's throughout the house that have rotted out completely, leaving holes in the slab under the floor tiles. Truly disgusting construction.

A Milestone

We reached a milestone today. The downstairs of the old house is empty. The asbestos guy comes in the morning to take up the floor tiles.

It was 90 degrees today and 71% humidity, and we worked through it. We are all so far beyond tired that we are numb, but a milestone has been reached. We still have some stuff to move from the second floor, but now we have to wait for the asbestos to be gone. After that, back to work.

Still Moving

We spent another long day mucking with the old, dusty stuff in the house, trying to get rid of it. The more we toss out, the higher the piles become.

We are not done yet.

The asbestos guy shows up on Thursday and says that the house must be empty.

We have one last day to get through this chore.

Oh, and guess what the weather is supposed to be tomorrow.........

We're Back - Sort Of

Well, it is Monday and the new internet connection is cranking. Hooray. So this blog is alive again. But that certainly was the highlight of the past weekend. Here is a brief summary the Weekend From Hell

Friday: We started getting ready for the movers at 5:00 a.m. We finally stopped at 10:30 p.m. ... exhausted but not finished yet. Of course, the weather was hot and humid. It rained on us all Friday afternoon. It was grueling

Saturday: We started early again, hoping to get finished before the movers showed up. Of course it was 90 degrees and humid, but the movers showed up on time and had all the furniture moved by mid afternoon. Great kudos to the movers! But when the bill came it was $666.50. I am not making this up. I gave the guys all a tip to break the spell.

Sunday: The tips didn't break the spell. I went down to the basement at the rental and found that the basement floor was flooded. We called the landlord, who left a message with his fix-it guy, who did not return the call. We continued to work at the other house, but did not finish moving everything out. Nobody called back about the flood.

Monday: At first it looked like the puddle was drying up, but then it got bigger. So we gave up on the landlord's fix-it guy and called our own plumber, who showed up in an hour and told us the bad news. The "water" in the basement was raw sewage that had backed up into the washing machine and subsequently onto the floor. We had a 20 foot stream of sewage in the basement.

Two plumbers and one HAZMAT crew later, the mess is gone, but so is the day.

And we have not yet finished moving out of the house.

The asbestos guys are supposed to come on Wednesday to tear out the floors.

Go ahead. Ask me how my weekend went.

The bright side is that the Verizon guy showed up and got us back on line so that I can complain about it all on this blog.