Originally posted on 2020-10-11
“What are you preparing?! You’re always preparing! Just go!” Dark Helmet from Spaceballs, 1987.
This week saw us continuing to prepare to demolish the house, but we still have a lot to do before we get there. Tearing down a house isn’t as straight forward as one might think, especially if people have been using the house that needs to come down. The eastern room we haven’t used in several months but there is still a fair amount of stuff that needs to come out of it before we tear it completely down.
Some of you may recall back in November of 2018, we dug a trench and buried an electrical wire from the house to the garage we turned into a shop. With the hydro now moved, power was no longer traveling through that wire so we couldn’t do much with the shop. We needed to dig up that power wire so we can connect it to the breaker panel inside the part of the house that will remain standing, for now.
Digging it up was much easier this time with the tractor than it was last time with shovels, but it still required a bit of manual digging as we were looking for the big O that housed the electrical wire. Once we found it we followed it with the tractor. We had tried to simply pull the wire through at the shop end once we got the house end into the crawlspace but that didn’t work. We worried we would have to dig up the entire line.
But we didn’t have to. One good reason to put the electrical wire into a big O before burying it is when you accidentally hit it with the tractor it breaks the big O and not the electrical wire. This turned out to be a good thing though. With this break, we were able to pull the wire out of the house and straighten it as the other pulled from the shop. Whatever it is was snagged on to prevent us from pulling it before must have been before this spot. Then we just needed to get it into the house next to the waterline, which was simple enough. The only downside to that was the necessity to go into our very tight crawlspace. (The new house is planned to have a crawlspace with approximately. five feet of clearance.)
The other thing that needed to be done now that the power has been moved is the breaker panel in the eastern room needed to be removed before we demolish. We also needed to move our internet cable so it’s coming in on the right side of the house. It quickly got reinforced how annoying it is that the only open door to the living space and the only door to that room (that aren’t blocked off) is on the other side of the house. So we decided to make another “doorway”.
Learn from our mistake: When taking out a wall remove the window first. We weren’t really intending on making a hole as big as we did, and we had no intention of keeping that window, but it took forever to clean up all that glass. We will be sure to remove all the remaining windows before driving the tractor into any more walls.
We still need to empty out the rest of the house that’s being torn down and figure out what to keep and what to get rid of, then decide where to put all the things we are keeping. Our main living area is already full and we need to spend the next day or so tidying and organizing that before we bring more things into the house. For the next while, we will be living in basically a two-bedroom apartment, though we still get to look out at the lake. Tight quarters for a bit, but it will be worth it to get the house we have planned.
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Huron The Lake 