The Demo job on the Trailer was a very emotional event. It was a
culmination of emotions that felt like the ending of years of ideas,
planning, working, blood sweat and tears. This felt like we were
done, and that we indeed had wonThe night before Josh
was to come over and start demolishing Dee, Sonya, and I danced and sang
high spirited praises as we smudged the new house, and proceeded to the
trailer with drums banging & sage smudging. Sonja and Dee were
praising, I was banging rhythms on the drum, and we all said goodbye to
the old home, a trailer, a life now past and moved our spirits into the
new home built by our hands, our blood, sweat, and tears. It was all
good - very spiritual. Thank you Sonja and Dulane.
It was an eerie scene and was just after Katrina hit New
Orleans. It looked exactly like the aftermath pictures from that
hurricane. The whole event for about a month of time gave us a sense
of loss and triumph all at the same time. |
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On February 6, 2006 Josh once more to come drive the big
excavator machinery to crunch up the trailer. He had great fun smashin'
& crashing and did a fine job of not damaging the new house or garage that
was as close as 2' to the walls of the trailer he was demolishing!
Good Job Josh. |
First we had to move and empty the trailer.
I was also under the impression I had to disable all utility fixtures.
So, as we were unloading stuff, I was cutting pips, tearing out electrical
boxes and genuinely destroying anything that made it livable. Found
out after the hours of work that I didn't need to do that after all!
Gotta love those county planners. |
| I wanted to try to recycle as
much as I could even though everyone tried talking me out of it. There
was a fella who came over and removed most of the copper plumbing to recycle
during this conflict. After that I stuck to my guns and started
scrapping out anything recyclable. I was able to recycle LOTS of
material rather than pay to have it dumped. |
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Cousin Jack came over with his torch and cut the huge metal trailer frame
beams into manageable recyclable pieces for me. He had fun too!
For months afterwards we would find
recognizable bits and pieces strewn around the grounds. |
Not pictured is a huge dumpster we had
delivered into the driveway. Like the rest of the project, I was
determined to do as much as possible myself. Even the demolishon, and
disposal. It took 4-8X8X20 dumpster loads to get most of the trailer
remains. Josh got everything smashed to ground level except the large
old deck in the back. It was just to far to reach. I had to do
that by hand ;( |
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As we demolished I pulled out any lumber or wood, copper, aluminum etc.
Anything I could recycle and fire up the wood bits. I fired for 3 days
and nights and got rid of allot of wood debris The cost just to rid ourselves of the trailer was about
$2,000.00. Had we hired out the job it would have been around
$5,000.00 |
AS much as we crashed and trashed the trailer
after 4 dumpster loads there was still an enormous amount of debris around
the area. We followed up with about 3 pickup trucks Heaped to the top
of the truck racks off to the dump. After all the
demo work, we had a HUGE pit where the trailer basement was. |
| It was April before we were able
to start filling in, and it was well after May before we got it under
control enough to use wheel barrows and a lawn mower trailer to finish up
the 1st phase of landscaping. It took 8 huge dump truck loads of fill
dirt to fill the hole. I think there are about 7-8 yards to the dump
truck load.
This time "I" drove the equipment to fill the hole.
I got an education from the bobcat - see the pic above and notice the bobcat
is tipped over and nearly tumbling into the void of a basement hole below.
Could have been disastrous! We had to get another 4 dump truck loads
of better soil to cover the old trailer space. We followed that up
with weeks of work moving dirt & rock, and 6 truckloads of horse manure.
Dee seeded with clover because we were already past the time for planting
grass. Perhaps we should have purchased turf, but we have been sorta
out of money lately.
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