Clean Up

Two weekends ago, Matt and I took advantage of the temporary(or what we thought was temporary) spring-like temperatures to start the clean up of all the construction trash that had piled up over the past few months. It's two giant piles of scrap lumber, packaging plastic and styrofoam, shingles, trim scraps, and hardiplank siding scraps, and lunch/food wrappers from the workers. I don't have a picture of the piles, but you can see it in the picture below(click to enlarge). There is a second smaller pile behind the truck.


















Even though we have access to a dump truck, the dump doesn't let you dump for free and we were pretty sure that they charge even more for construction trash. So we thought of how we could work around that. The city doesn't let you pile up construction trash at the curb, but they wouldn't know it was construction trash if we could fit it in our can. So, we carried our curbside can from Charlotte to Stanley to fill up.

Of course, we knew it wouldn't all fit, so we sorted it in to piles.
1. Good lumber to save.
2. Lumber to burn(most full of nails or messed up in some way).
3. Trash.
After sorting out all the lumber, most of the rest fit in the trash can.

We filled up our flatbed trailer with lumber to save. It was a lot, but it could come in handy after we move in and need indoor and outdoor storage. We will have the lumber(which we paid a pretty penny for) to make shelves and bins and benches and whatever else we need.

One of my jobs was to take a magnet and pick up all the nails around the house. It was a lot. We picked up this magnet on a stick that made just for picking up nails, so you don't have to bend down to much. Looks kinda like this but without wheels:
























I built a fire and started throwing the burn pile on. It turned into quite a big fire and it was windy and dry. But don't worry, I had the water hose nearby and I wet the ground pretty good. And it's inside a fire ring...I promise. You just can't see it because the flaming boards are hanging outside of it.



















Oooh, pretty...



















Enjoy this little action sequence:























































The other thing we did that day was to pull up the boards that molded the concrete slab floor, and push gravel up to it so you can actually drive a car into the garage. You can see the board in the picture below.

















It was so wedged in there that the only way to get it up was to use the skid steer(a type of tractor) to bite one of the 2x4's sticking up and use the skid steer to pull it out of the ground. Worked like a charm. We used the skid steer in about 5 different ways that day. We own half of it(I think) and Matt's parents own half. It's the last tractor they bought and we all can't believe we went so many years without it. It is the most useful tool EVER! We use it for everything! Need that boulder picked up? No problem. Need that 5 tons of dirt moved? No problem. Is that wood stove in your way? No problem. Here she is below in a photo that's completely irrelevant to this post.


















We already had the gravel, which was leftover from something else. Using a skid steer to push it around sure beats a shovel and wheel barrow. After all our hard work, here's what it's looking like these days. Still one baby trash pile, but we'll get to it. The opened windows? That's for chucking 2x4's out of them because there were too many to carry up and down the stairs.