Originally posted on 2020-12-06
Now that the house is partially down we need to get the debris out of the way so we can tear down more.
Friday we had a very large bin delivered to our house so this weekend was spent clearing out the part of the house we’ve torn down. It was reinforced yet again that trying to do this around both of us working full time is much more stressful than it was when we were both retired and fixing up the house was all we were doing. As much as we got done this weekend we are keenly aware of how much we didn’t get done, and thus will need to do next weekend when the temperature is expected to drop.
Unfortunately, the filling of the bin has to be done by hand as the bin is too big and we don’t want to risk puncturing the tires (again) on the nails in the house debris. We are using a large outdoor garbage pail to haul the smaller items up from the pile and carrying up the larger items. Because of how much we’ve been using the tractor for other projects this felt very slow, though we did get a lot done. Doing by hand though allows us to sort and stack inside the bin to maximize how much we can fit. We’re hoping that we can get rid of the whole house (that’s planned to be torn down now) in two bins. We’ll see if we can accomplish that.
To keep us warm as we worked we decided to burn some of the wood that used to make up our house. We used an old piece of culvert we had lying around to get the smoke above us so we didn’t have to constantly walk through it between the pile and the bin. This worked very well to keep us warm and we will continue to do it as we continue to work and the weather outside becomes even colder.
By the end of the day on Sunday we felt like we had done a lot, and looking at the debris pile confirmed we had done a lot, but looking at the bin we felt like we did very little as there is still so much room in it. That’s good for reaching our goal, but it’s not great for morale when it seems like you didn’t do much. At least the pile makes us feel good, considering we had broken up some more of the house into manageable pieces using the tractor. We hope to have the bin full before our next dumping of snow as we don’t really want to pay to haul snow to the dump.
So we are living in what is basically a two-story apartment totaling 850 square feet. Although I state that as if it’s new, it’s really not. It’s the same area we lived in last winter as it was easier to keep warm. In truth, all we really lost was a bunch of storage space which simply made us evaluate what was worth keeping as we cleaned out things we hadn’t touched in over a year.
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Huron The Lake 