Where do I begin?
This has been one real crappy weekend.
Saturday I had a dumpster dropped off outside my house so I could finally get some real progress made. Well, I've been making progress all the time but everything seemed to be held up by not being able to throw anything out. I just kept making big piles. Then after they yelled at me at the dump for trying to dump bags of plaster, I finally caved and put down my $350 for an 18 yard dumpster.
So Saturday was pretty good. It was very therapeutic to smash walls with a sledgehammer after we lost the election. I yelled 'Fuck Bush!' through my respirator as it rained plaster. And it was a lot easier to dump trash cans of plaster than try to bag them up. It was still back breaking and toxic-ly dusty but it had to be done.
The first bit of strange trash someone threw in the dumpster was a box that said 'infectious waste' on it with a big red biohazard symbol on it. It was all taped up and I didn't feel like opening the infectious waste so I just put it out on the sidewalk and was going to call 311 about it.
Then before I left that night I found another couple bags of clothes or something in my dumpster. Both times people threw things in, I was just inside the house. I turn my back for a minute and boom! more trash. I felt like I needed to have someone standing outside watching the dumpster so no one threw anything in it. Maybe I shouldn't have had the radio on that loud. Right then I should have at least pulled a tarp out of the back and covered it... Hindsight it 20/20.
So the next afternoon I stoll up to the house, climb up the dumpster to take a quick peek and just froze in shock. Then there was the cussing. Then the disbelief and then more cussing and kicking things, etc. etc.
The dumpster was about 2/3 full of other peoples random trash. Mattresses, a TV, doors, chairs, porno magazines, you name it. It was full of trash. I mean full. I just looked at that and thought, "I'm screwed." The entire first floor of my house was full of wood, paneling and other debris. Up until this point I was wondering how I was going to manage to get it all in there. But now...
One of my neighbors told me she saw the people throwing all the stuff out there. They were clearing their house out. She said it looked like a line of ants.
That really killed my spirits. And after being tired as hell from killing myself for 9 hours, I just wanted to cry.
Thats when Vicki came to the rescue. After a few days of standing on the sideline saying "I wish there was something I could do to help" I finally broke down and told her if she really wanted to help, go to Lowes and buy a $50 respirator and I'll pay for it. She was a tremendous help. Hudge! Everything went faster and she had more energy because she was fresh.
Everyone has theories about what to do with the trash in the dumpster. Should I call the cops and complain? Go track down the perpetrators and ask them to remove their trash? Dump the stuff back on their lawn? Dump the stuff across the street and call in an anonymous complaint?
But when it came down to it, the fact is I couldn't wait for any of those solutions. I need to dump my plaster and wood in it right then. I just pulled some of the bigger bulkier items out and stared back to work. After they pick the dumpster up tomorrow, I'll call 311 and have the city deal with it. That way when the cops come out, I won't get a citation for a dumpster without a permit.
So right now I've managed to do everything I wanted this weekend mostly. All the interior walls have been stripped upstairs. A lot of wood has been removed from the first floor. The bathroom has been taken apart. And I've started to rip up the linoleum on top of the wood floor. I'm really amazed at the how good the floor looks underneath. They laid down a layer of masonite before they laid down the layers of linoleum so the floor is well protected and it doesn't even look like it needed covering up. It's a perfectly beautiful floor under there. It's a real pain to pull up tho because they nailed about ever 5 inches. That's like 9 nails per square foot and might be roughly 10,000 nails for the entire floor. Ugh! Then add all the nails that held in the wood lathe to the stud for the plaster walls and I'm gonna get real sick of pulling nails.