Never enough shop vacs!

No pics today – just commentary. <sorry>

What a day!

I was supposed to wake up at 4:50am to take Samantha to swim practice … but I had been messing with wiring yesterday and cut off the power a couple times.  When we reset the alarm clock we messed up and set it for pm instead of am!! At 5am Sam comes into our room “daddy, aren’t you going to take me to practice?“.  (so responsible!)

Rob leaps into action, grabbing any clothes that are around, and we head out the door. Pajama bottoms, leather slip on Clark’s shoes, and a faux-sheepskin lined corduroy bomber jacket. What the heck – no one that is sane is up and about anyway!

Drop her off at the pool, get home, and start the day.

I need to dig a trench for the new power drop. We are adding a 200A service, and the electrician figures it is best to go underground from the meter (on the NW corner) to the panel (in the elect room). I need to dig a 3′ deep trench across the front of the house.

While I am digging I start getting phone calls. You see, last night I put our old cabinets up on Craigslist for $500. I was just going to toss them out – but Rick (the lead contractor) said to put them up so that we don;t have to pay to dump them. Well I guess $500 is a low price, because lots of people want them (they actually look nice in the photo <hehe>). I tell everyone the same thing “I want them gone – so I won’t hold them; first person here with a deposit can have them, as long as they are gone by the weekend”. Some dude shows up in 10 mins and gives me all the money in his wallet ($70). His dad comes by later with the balance … and looks at the stack of cabinets while muttering “hmmm – I can’t fit these in my truck!”.

Not my problem – as long as they are gone by the weekend. I keep digging.

Digging is quite therapeutic. You get exercise, you can get angry and shovel like mad for a while – until your arms start to burn. About this time you will certainly hit a rock. It will seem small – until you bang away at it and find that you are only hitting a tiny corner of a huge boulder! So you take out the pick axe and beat the shit out of it! It won’t move of course, until you get on your hands and knees, and scape the little bits of dirt and the smaller rocks from around it with your bare hands. It is like the rock is laughing at you … so all you can do is laugh back … and then beat on it with the pick axe!

Three feet deep. Doesn’t sound like much – does it? The problem is that all the rocks are at 18″, and at 2 feet is this really hard clay stuff. It is so hard that is sparks when you hit it with the shovel. Oh well – I dig to 2 feet. I will deal with the hard stuff tomorrow.

Rick is inside ripping out the kitchen. He comes out “hey Rob – do you have any dust masks?”. I happen to have a package of them in the shop so I go grab some and take them inside.

Holy Crap on a Cracker!

The kitchen floor (which was always more than a little spongy) is basically 2 inches of powdered rot and mold. It is dark brown, and it is mostly in suspension in the air! Ugly Ugly Ugly. (Sam and Nicky would say “NARSTY”). There are three guys ripping it up – and basically they have to shovel it out of the house. The air is filled with this browny-green floating particulate. I start to cough, and decide it is time to get the heck outa there!

I go into the shop and find an old commercial grade fan that I just happen to have (it is from a large green house –  and it moves lotsa air – like 10,000cfm or something) <don’t you all have a couple of these kicking around… yes …maybe I am a hoarder – but sometimes it actually is useful!>. We screw it into the place where the side door used to be, open all the other doors, and just suck the ugly stuff outa there (onto the neighbours lawn I think … good fertilizer … plants say “num num num”).

Once I am back outside I need to break up the concrete slab that is in font of the main door (because it is in the way of the trench I need to dig), so I do that and pile it with the other brick and concrete and rock that is waiting to be loaded into the trailer.

Then I jump in the truck and take a load of metal to the scrap yard (old radiator covers, flashing, oven, etc). Pick up Daniel on my way home. Daniel is a high school student who works for me after school on days that he is not doing school work. I was going to have him load the trailer with wood waste for a morning dump run – but I decided maybe it was his turn to dig.

It is now about 4pm, and the contractors are done for the day. Unfortunately there is about 1/4″ of dust and crap on the fridge and washer and dryer (the only things on the main floor that we still use). I go to shop vac them off – but it has no suction. Damn filter is plugged because I used it to suck up a couple gallons of water yesterday after we cut the radiators out of the main floor, and they shot their load onto the floor. It seems that old radiator water mixes well with concrete dust and other filth and dries into some sort of impenetrable mass that has the perfect molecular structure to coat a shop vac filter. So I take the vac apart, dump it, and proceed to wash the filter.

Of course there is no running water on the main floor – so I have to immerse the filter in the 0 degree swimming pool and scrub it (I knew we had the pool for a reason!!). Then I reassemble the vac and have a go at the appliances, floor, and stairs in the house (don’t want any of this moldy-rot-crap anywhere near where we are sleeping).

Finally I am caught up and I can go inside and remove nails from the huge pile of salvaged yellow cedar that came down today, and is now in the way – and needs to be moved outside to the “salvaged wood storage area” before the contractors show up tomorrow.

Kathy gets home from work and starts to cook dinner, “Rob, why is there dust in the fridge …“.

Sigh. Time for a soak in the hot tub.

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8pm: go to fridge, remove one bottle of Thor’s Hammer Barley Wine. Consume. Write blog entry.

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