Kings of the Trash Heap

This weekend went much better than last. Sunday was still wet, but the water was coming from the sky and stayed out of our house.

Saturday, however, was beautiful, and that was the critical day. We'd rented a 20-yard dumpster to get rid of our construction debris. We originally rented it because we were planning on re-roofing our house from scratch, but we had since since the folly of our plan and are now just going to re-roof right over it. Saves us some hassle and panic.

Anyway, the dumpster wasn't delivered until 7pm Friday night, so we didn't get started as early as we would have liked, but that was okay. Saturday morning a couple of loyal friends came over and we attacked the piles. Some of that debris had been sitting outside since we first tore out the living/dining room (a year and a half ago), so it was nice to finally get it cleaned up. We were worried that we weren't going to be able to fit it all in the dumpster, since it was looking pretty full after just the pile at the side of the house, and we still had the entire carport to do. But we made it! And our neighbors are liking it. I'm sure anything we do to make the rat hole less of an eyesore is a good thing in everyone's opinions. Little do they know that it will probably worse before it gets better, mwa ha.

Here are some pics.

The side of the house, before and after.

The carport, before and after.

The front of the house, before and after. We got rid of the weird, assorted pieces of rusted metal gear thingeys out front.

Me loading the dumpster.

When we were finished, we knew Sunday was supposed to be rainy, and since the garbage fee is determined by weight, we decided we didn't want to pay unnecessarily just because our garbage was loaded with water. Luckily, our lot came with an abundance of nasty old blue tarps. We spread a few out, and then got one from the deepest depths of our yard, which has been sitting undisturbed for who knows how long (we've never touched it). We think this is where the slugs for our entire neighborhood come from, judging by what we saw when we lifted the tarp. Anyway, this final tarp was actually big enough to cover the entire dumpster, which makes us think it was used to keep water off the roof at one point in time or another. Lucky us!

Unfortunately, some of our garbage poked up too far above the rim, so this morning we had to take the tarps off to reconfigure some of the stuff inside the dumpster. And then it poured all day. Oh well. At least it only got ONE day of rain instead of TWO. We'll see how much we end up paying.