Patience Really Is A Virtue

I have a job that demands that you attempt to do five things at once.  That you hurry up and get everything done yesterday.  A job that requires a great deal of focus and a great lack of patience.  Unrealistic deadlines are promised to appease the client and then we burn the midnight oil to meet that deadline.  Unfortunately this impatience has spilled into the rest of my life.  I get pissed off if I have to wait more than a minute for a red light, or if the ATM machine is not giving me my money fast enough.  I get snappy if my daughter is walking to slow.  I scream at my computer if it's not downloading something fast enough.  I rush into work super early, stay late, sit in traffic and listen to the redundant news reports making observations of our impatient society. This garage project however is slowly eroding that impatience and making me aware that a more normal time line requires the virtue of patience.  When I started I knew the digging was going to take some time.   The demo had to be carefully done, so that would also take some time.  Once I was past that I figured things were going to fly.  But when your goal is to spend as little money as possible and acquire most of the materials for free, things have a way of taking much more time than you expect.  Trying to compact and level the ground where your footing is going to go when you still have a "floating" garage wall in the way takes time.  Building forms when your scrounging wood takes time.  Finding free rebar requires incredible patience! (No one gives that stuff away!) Tying rebar is insanely slow.  Of course there's always that "job" situation that gets in the way.  The weather also took its toll on my timeline.  How easy it is to spend a raining day on the couch with a good book than to be sloshing around in the mud.  This late winter and spring in Seattle have been pretty wet.  But the sun is breaking out of the clouds for longer periods, the days are extending and my motivation to get this damn thing onto a foundation is in high gear.  It survived the winter storms (although the tent is almost toast) but I can't push my luck.  Not to mention I don't want to raise the curiosity of to many neighbors as my garage continues to mysteriously hover eight inches off the ground. But... as I implied, "Patience is not only a virtue in this situation, by completely necessary.

I've had a few small victories over the past months.  I did hunt down some re-bar for virtually free.  Sitting in someone's back yard that he sold me for a third of the going price.  (I will have to calculate how much will go into the garage foundation as I am also building the footing for my kitchen at the same time.)  I have hunted down a couple of salvaged skylights and a window.  I acted to slow on a great daylight door that would have been perfect so that didn't end up in my collection.  (a little to much patience) I also pain stakenly moved over 100 pieces of salvaged limestone pavers to my yard that will eventually be a patio where the tent is currently sitting.

With every victory though, I have had setbacks.  I spent three days tying re-bar into place.  I had to lay it out into the correct location so that it will fit eventually fit within the cinder blocks I plan to make the wall with.  I took my time to measure out and mark the location of where every piece needed to go, only to discover that I was off by 2" each!  I had to cut them all out and start over… Patience!  In order to bend the re-bar, I had to get a hold of a re-bar bender.  I had to keep borrowing one from work and could only use it when they were not using it... Patience!  When I had the money to buy the concrete, the weather was bad.  When the weather was good I didn't have the money... Patience!  

Currently I only have enough forming material to do one side of the garage foundation at a time as.  Once that concrete is poured, I will have to pull apart the forms and reuse them on the other side... Patience!  Of course the big rock I have to form around is not helping either... Patience!

Finally the stars where align!  I had the money, I had the good weather, and I had a truck with a trailer hitch, the rebar in place, I WAS GOOD TO GO.  I got up early with great anticipation to go get my concrete!  What a way to start my three-day holiday.   Pouring at least one footing was going to be a milestone.  I got to the concrete yard ready for action.  I was then told that the power was down and they couldn't mix concrete that day.  "You'll have to reschedule,” the concrete man said to my disappointed face... Patience.  

Oh well.  I guess I'll weed the garden.

Heavy Work

Happy May Day!  

I haven't updated this blog in a while and I do apologize as I have found myself extremely busy.  Like most in America, I have found myself busy with work.  I should clarify as I do enjoy a good day of work.  What I mean is my JOB.  The activity that which takes up most of the hours of my life and pays for the roof over my head, the food on the table and the clothes on my back.  I could bitch and moan about how much I am dis-satisfied with my job, but that would be preaching to the choir, right? I do not mind putting in my time to earn a wage, but within reason.  I find myself spending 9, 10 sometimes 12 hours of my day dedicated to my job in order to meet deadlines.  Bringing work home with me.  Getting up earlier to get some things done before my phone starts ringing and distracts me from my  assigned tasks.  If this job was my passion, or paid me a larger salary, I'd feel better about the 50 hour weeks.  But it is not, and therefore I watch the days pass, wanting like most, the time to spend with my daughter or go out to the woods for a day of fishing or working on my garage.  

Today is May 1^st.  “May Day” or International Worker’s Day.  As I celebrate this day labor I want to tell you about a park in my hometown of Milwaukee WI.  In this park there is a forgotten monument that sits in the ground with grass and weeds hiding it from view.  A metaphor to our fading historical memory.  The monument memorializes a day in the 1886 when a massacre happened at a steel mill that once sat on that spot.  Workers in the mill went on strike.  The steel company sent in their thugs to break up the strike.  The strikers refuse to yield so the state where dispatched to break up the strike and protect the factory.  As the workers march onto the factory the nervous troops opened fire on the unarmed strikers killing seven and wounding many.  What were the mill workers striking for?  What did some die for?  They were demanding an eight-hour work day.  Like many factory workers in America at the time they were forced to work 12 to 16 hour shifts in dangerous conditions and live in cramped company houses. (sound familiar)  The unions organized demanding safe working conditions, better wages and the eight-hour day.  "8 HOURS OF WORK, 8 HOURS OF SLEEP AND 8 HOURS TO DO AS YOU WILL!" was their slogan.   Oh how I want those eight hours to do as I will.  Where's my union rep?  Long gone.  Actually I'm part of the management team, so I guess I would have been on the other side.

But back to my May Day Celebration…I want to tell you a little about the city I grew up in.  Milwaukee, once a manufacturing Mecca of the mid-west, cradle of progressive politics and blue-collar fraternal union.  The only city in America that voted into power the Socialist Party that held the Mayor's office from 1910 until the 1960.  Developing a governing philosophy of “Public Enterprise”.  Known as the “Sewer Socialists as they strived clean up government and provide their citizens working sewers, good roads and decent public education.  (I can see why so many feel frighten by socialism!)

I think of the blue-collar middle class neighborhood I grew up in.  Most of folks living there had manufacturing jobs and were members of a union. In fact, at their peak in the 50's through the late 70's 8 out of 10 manufacturing workers in Milwaukee (and most of the U.S.) were union members.  The middle class was broad and strong.  People in my neighborhood were able, on their blue collar wages, buy a house, send their kids to college, and provide a pretty stable environment for their family.  I remember many strikes as a kid.  I remember the big factories shutting down to move out of the US for the cheaper labor.  Big names like Allis Chalmers, Harnischfeger, Johnston Controls, and Caterpillar.   Even the factories that made Milwaukee famous, Schlitz, Blats, Pabst were bought up, boarded up and shipped out.  The empty factories turned into shopping centers for K-marts, Wallmarts and Home Depots.  The arguments started and still plays out today;  Where the unions to unyielding and spoiled that they drove the jobs over seas, or did greed?  I do wonder.  I’ve seen first hand union cronyism, but I also look at a company like Apple that makes billions in profits while the people who make their products work in similar conditions of those who died in the 1886 massacre. While in the U.S. the resentment of those not being able to have a decent paying job or a secure life has somehow been directed against the entity that once built our middle class.  The unions have been decimated , the middle class is crumbling and the last havens of union security are now caught in a witch hunt.  Being hunted down and snuffed out as many watch from the sidelines stating "I don't get these kind of benefits, why should they?"  Now I recently read an article in the Economist how manufactures are starting to move their operations back to America because Chinese labor is getting to expensive.  And I, like many Americans now work 10 to 12 hour days.  Go figure.

But enough of my socialistic babble.  What the hell is going on with my garage?  As I said, I've had little time to work on it.  Perhaps I’ve never really had a lot of time as this has been a slow process, but I'm growing more impatient to get this thing on a foundation.  The winds have been relentless this past winter and I've spent an unyielding amount of time repairing my garage tent.  Things have kept pretty dry all things considered and my lovely green tarp continues to hold.

I did have to spend some money on some heavy equipment in order to break up the perimeter of the existing slab.  I needed to gain at least 8 inches to put in the form for the new spread footing.  I rented a concrete saw for a couple of hours to score a nice clean line.  This was a bit of a challenge to control this saw in such a confined space without killing my lower back.  Not to mention the exhaust.  It was like having my mouth on the tail pipe of a car.  (talk about creating my own safe working conditions) I was pretty light headed by the time I finished and covered with water and concrete dust.  I was under the delusion that the slab was only 4" thick, so I thought that I could simply bust it up with a sledge hammer and some brute force.  I was sadly mistaken.  My fist swing at the concrete could have been the inspiration to a  Bugs Bunny cartoon.  As the head of the sledge hammer made contact with concrete I anticipated some push back, but not to the degree that I ended up feeling.  The impact shooting right through my arms through my shoulders straight through my spine to my hips and eventually my knees.  I stepped back for a moment and realized I had to rent even more equipment.  Thus started my second journey to the  tool rental  store (Center Tool Rental in White Center is  great!) to get me something fun!  

A 20lbs jack hammer.  Rented it for the 2 hour minimum, but it only took me 20 minutes to bust out that baby. 

Although I found  that there was really no attempt to level the ground before the slab was poured so the slab was any where from 4 to 8" thick as I pulled it out.  

Once I had that out.  Yes, it was time for more digging.  But I’ll spare you that and get to the next exciting phase.  But right now, I have to get back to my job.

Nice and clean

TREASURES

The entry you all have been waiting for!  Treasures from deep beneath the ground of my backyard.  The following photos are a collection of objects that have been unearthed as I did the "Big Dig" around the garage.  Special thanks to my friend Francis LasPinas for some of the more artsy photos.

THE COINS

I owe my former chickens the credit for finding the mercury head dime and the 50 cents token. (Good Lord!  I was just looking for the cent symbol on the keyboard and there isn't one!!)  You can see that the chickens got a few good pecks at the token before finally picked it up to investigate the finding.  I found the $1 token and the 2 Indian Head nickels during the dig.  I don't believe these all must have been dropped at the same time as the dime is dated 1944.  One one the nickels you can barely make out the date of 1928.  The two tokens I did some research on and here the story.  The St. Elias Packing Company has offices in Seattle and built a packing plant in Yakutat Alaska in 1909.  The records i was able to look up on line showed that it only operated this particular plant until 1916 when it was sold to another company.  I had found quite a few of these tokens on some crazy websites dedicated to token collecting. This has lead me to believe that yes, there is a website for just about anything.  One site listed these as "company script payed to workers for trade in dry goods".  So whoever had the holes in their pockets probably dropped these in my yard pretty early in the last century.  My house was built in 1920. I'm sure the garage came shortly after it.

WHO KNOWS WHAT?

So many objects lost.  So many found.  You can see the name The Wehrle Co. of Newark Ohio on the gage.  In my research I came across an article about The Wehrle Co. "maker of cooking and heating stoves".  So this is a temperature gage for a stove.  The ones I saw were small cast iron stoves that stood about 3 feet high with a door on the front.  The Wehrle Co. started in 1899 and was eventually changed their name to the Newark Stove Co. in 1939.  Sears & Roebuck Co. bought them in 1945 and began producing Kenmore Stoves at the plant.  The bottle I would like to think is old, but given the screw top and the fact I found it near where the garbage cans sit, it's probably an old vanilla bottle from the past decade.

However, this bottle shows a little more hope of being an antique.  The key?  Looks like it's for a clock.  The bullet casing?  I can imagine someone hunting grouse when it was farm fields or shooting rats in an urban alley.  The gold item is the remains of a cuff link.

I'm still looking for the fork and the plate to this set.
The spoon is actually silver.

Of course not all the objects I found were elegant treasures.  Some gave me reason to wonder.  I dug up a number of bones.  I'm not sure if they were from a family pet from long ago of if this old ax head that I uncovered had anything to do with bones.

Or these fine implements of torture.  

However Francis had a more clever outlook on these.

Imagine shaving with this.  For some of you looking at this blog you may not know what Woolworth was.  It was the Wallmart of it's time.

I found an old battery that had completely disintegrated, but the paper label remained.  Made by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co.  Check out the date.  A month and year of great importance to our country.  But behold the finest object to be pulled from the depths of the garage walls!  An object that truly symbolizes a bygone era.  Good thing to find after a hard day of digging in the dirt.

The Big Dig

BEFORE

AFTER

I have a confession.  My blog is not, at this point, in real time.  In fact, I am really months behind in my writing in comparison to where I am in this reconstruction process.  However, once I started digging out all the dirt that needed to remove in order to expose the full foundation of the garage, I have gotten the opportunity to get caught up to present time.  In fact, this blog entry could simply be this: “… and then I began to dig.  And I dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and I dug and I dug some more”.  I knew I had to move a lot of dirt.  I knew it was going to take some time.  I didn’t realize just how much.   Just take a look at this pile!

I actually started digging the weekend of Thanksgiving.  I would head out after work and limit myself to an hour of digging or until the sun went down.  On the weekends I would dedicate even more time.  I became pretty obsessed.  I thought I would breeze though it, but one never knows what they will find under the ground and I encountered many obstacles as I dug.  And, like a tired stubborn toddler who refuses to leave the park when you’re in a hurry to get home, these obstacles greatly slowed my progress.   Rocks, concrete rubble, bricks, latex balls…you name it, I probably found it buried in my yard.  The latex ball really blew me away.  It was huge!  I originally pulled it out when I planted a tree in my back yard.  I picked the place to put it, started digging and eventually began chipping out some psychedelic multi-colored rock.  I dug around it and pulled out a large boulder of dried latex paint!  It seems one of the former owners decided the best way to get rid of their old paint was to dig a huge hole and pour it in, let it dry and bury it.  When I pulled it out it left a big enough hole to fit the entire root ball of the tree I planted.  It didn’t seem to contaminate the soil as the tree is doing well after two years.  I have come to the conclusion that many years ago, when my neighborhood was a farmer’s orchard, the spot that is now my yard is where the old farmer dumped his trash.  The dig at times became like an archaeological site as I sifted through the soil with my homemade sifter.  I will have to dedicate an entry to the incredible items I pulled out of the ground and out of the walls of the garage.  Each piece sparking the depths of my imaginations as they whispered their stories to me.  Where they came from, what there life was like and how they ended up in the ground around my garage.   I found some old coins and tokens that must have fallen out of the pocket of who ever built this garage.  I found pieces of silverware, a broken mug, little bottles, large nails and spikes, pieces to an old stove, an ax head, a bullet casing and the bones to what, I do not know.  Maybe I don’t want to know.  Things that kept me guessing, wondering and daydreaming for hours.

Rocks that made up the foundation

What the hell does this go to??

All came from under my garage

However, most of the things I unearthed were more an exhausting challenge than a delightful treasure.  As my shovel banged off of one rock after another I would think back to drives I would take through the Wisconsin country side where one runs across lovely rustic fieldstone wall that travel on for miles.  Not because the farmers of the past thought to themselves “I think I’ll build a lovely rustic wall of fieldstone”.  No, it was more like “Good God, another damn rock I gotta get out of the way!” as he tried to plow the virgin landscape.  I built a similar wall along the back edge of my alley. 

The experience made me ponder and greatly appreciate what those early pioneers must have gone through to open up the square miles of land we have for farming today.  Especially if it was completely forested upon their arrival.  I can’t imagine that the first settler even saw a substantial amount of cleared land before they passed on.  I imagine it took two or three generations to clear some of this land.  Cutting trees, building a house and barn, clearing stumps (some the size of houses) removing rocks and boulders, cutting away roots. That’s what really slowed me down.  Roots spreading from plants I don’t even know where they were standing.  

THE ROCK!

Then there was the monster rock that after much digging and prying, I decided it would stay where it chose as its final resting place.  Well, rest in peace my dear rock.  You shall be not only the anchor of this foundation, but a mentor to my life’s endeavors.  Though you will be underground, the images of the struggles you put me through and the lessons of accepting that some things need not change, shall forever be in the forefront of my memories each time I enter this structure.  

Look at what's left of that foundation

NOW WHAT?

You Get What You Pay For

There is the old saying that you get what you pay for.   Every day I can be reminded of that.  It’s not hard when you’re a cheap bastard like me.  But should I say I’m a cheap bastard or a broke one?  A combination of the two would be fair.  I’m like a lot of Americans who are pinching pennies.  I can easily sell out a quality product for the so-called “bargain”.  The question is why?  Times are tough, but it doesn’t seem that the word “bargain” or “cheap” have much to do about doing with less because we have less to spend.  Instead it creates a positive image in our head that we are sniffing out the savings by buying more for less.  Something inbred into our psyche for the past 5 decades.  Give me more for cheaper.  I call it the Wal-Mart affect.  Give me the cheapest price and I’ll over look the actual quality of what I’m buying.  It doesn’t matter because when it breaks, there’s another cheap one I can buy, so just throw this one away.  Quantity over quality.  Once upon a time “Made in America” was thought of as the stamp of quality.  But as the words “bargain” and “cheap” metamorphosed and our belief that a brand name is worth more than actual quality, we began to accept some things.  Accept that in order to get those bargains, those things needed to be made in China or somewhere else because they would cost too much if they were made here.  As we make less money and we’re trying to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table we accepted that anything that might make a product more expensive is bad.  Who can blame us?  As we are looking for jobs we accept that quality control doesn’t need to be regulated. “Those damn regulations just make things more expensive and kill jobs”, is what we hear the politicians yelling.  But maybe what has killed our jobs is our acceptance that cheaper is better.  That profit trumps quality and a belief that the “market” will answer our demands for better quality.  “Give us a quality product made by people earning a quality wage and produce it in a way that takes in mind the quality the environment.  One needs only to take a trip to China (or Houston, for that matter) or a walk through the aisles of any Wal-Mart or Target to see what we must really be demanding.  We’re getting what we want to pay for.

I can preach and attest to this because I, like most, am a victim to this acceptance.  I go to Home Depot for the cheaper price.  I’ll pick the non-organic apple because it’s cheaper.  I’ll go to Arco and put crappy gas in my truck because it’s cheaper.  As I attempt re-focus the definition of “doing with less” back into the word cheap by attempting to re-build my garage on next to nothing, the temptation is overwhelming to overlook the quality of something when you are getting it for free. 

I wish I took a picture of how I stuffed this thing

I pulled the roof off my garage.  Generally when I have massed a pile of non-recyclables I put it into my trash can in small portions so I don’t have to pay the $30 dump fee at the transfer station.  That’s cheap. However, the roof was a big item and to discard it in my usual method would take about 3 years to have it disappear.   So I put a crow bar into my wallet and paid for a dumpster.  This was not only worth the $250 investment for the various pains in my butt it saved me, but also because the hauling company did the sorting of the trash for me.   (Marilyn’s recycling rules. They bring the dumpster on a truck with a claw and can gingerly place it where you need it rather than just drop it in the street.)  Of course I was too cheap to pay the extra $30 bucks for a dumpster with the locking lid.  I will not make that mistake again.  Where there is a dumpster mysterious trash will appear.  I naturally had to use every inch of this dumpster efficiently and get my money’s worth, so I tore down my deck as well.  That was a frightening thing to look upon.  The person who built it perhaps thought getting the treated lumber was too expensive.  Perhaps they made an environmental choice and wanted the deck to eventually break down and return to the earth.  Who can say?  What I can say;  is that it was getting close to that state and I confirmed my suspicions of where the carpenter ants where living.  The past owner of the house did a pretty good job of hiding the rotting beam under a layer of treated lumber.  When I tore the deck apart, I thought I’d hire the neighbor’s boys to help.  Give them a chance to earn some spending cash. I think they were pretty excited to help smash the deck apart, but the thing came apart so easily that by the time they picked up their friend and came back, I had the entire thing in pieces.  I didn’t even use a crowbar!  All that was left for them was to help clean up.  They made $10 each which hasn’t motivated them to help me out anymore.  Go figure. (What a cheap bastard!)  What frightened me most was how the main beam literally crumbled in my hands.  Think of all the BBQ’s I’d hosted on that deck… then again…  Let’s not.

Now you see it

Now you don't

So it took me two days to pull the roof off and clean up the debris. (This would have gone faster with the neighbor’s boys helping me.  But they respectfully declined.  Go figure!)  Now with my roof gone, the load was lighter but I still needed to keep what was left in the garage dry.  I needed a huge tarp!  I wanted to spare my neighbors the visual trauma of seeing a blue tarp sitting on this garage for perhaps the next year or so.  I wanted a brown tarp so it still looked like a roof.  To my excitement, a co-worker had just that.  He offered me a huge brown tarp his son left in his basement and that he wanted to get rid of.  I took it with great enthusiasm as a new tarp big enough to fit on the entire garage would cost upwards of $50 to $70!  It was a bit worn but I figured it would work.  Besides, who can complain?  It was free.  I marveled at my good fortune when I had it secured to the top of the garage.  That was until it rained.  The tarp had all the water repellant qualities of an old bed sheet.  As I said, “You get what you pay for.”  

A piece of advice if you are a novice scavenger:  Free is good.  Free is valuable.  But when you are receiving an item from a very willing donator, check the quality of that item before dragging it home.  I have stated before the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.  But there is another old saying,  “One man’s trash really can be one man’s trash”.

I am happy to report that I did procure a better tarp.  A green tarp to go with my yellow garage.  Go Packers!  (next season).

Now that the load is lighter, stuff emptied out and the structure secured, it's time to start digging!

The Box

 

So here’s the deal with the garage.  Its 80 years old.  It’s dark and scary on the inside.  Full of spiders, rodents and other creeping things that make you hesitate at the door before entering.  It smells of oil, automotive fumes and rat poop.  The interior walls are covered with 80 years of dust and soot and globs of old spider webs that create such a state of anxious flicking as you try to get them off you.  The roof is covered in layers of moss that has eaten through a hole.  The main issue is the foundation.  There really isn’t one.   Like an archeologist trying to uncover and understand the building techniques of the ancient Egyptians or the Mayans I unearthed the foundation of the garage.  What I found was not surprising in its bold attempt to be a foundation, but rather that the garage was still standing on it.  My understanding of what the original builder put down as a foundation was this; six large concrete blocks  or stones with a beam that was notched and placed over these blocks and stones .  From there, he built the rest of the garage on top of it and then buried it.  Under 12” of dirt in some places.  So after sitting under the dirt for 80 years, the beam was pretty much gone.  It was easy to understand why the garage doesn’t have a plum or level surface to it. 

My parents are pretty much the same age as my garage.  I find it humorous when I ask my dad how he's doing and he’ll list off a number of usual ailments of an 80 year old.  “Difficult to hear, can’t see, my knees hurt, my back is sore, I can’t pee… but other than that, I’m doing great.”   Same with my garage.  Other than that, it’s in great shape.  It still has strong bones made of real 2” x 4” tight grain old growth fir held together by cast iron 16 penny nails that can destroy a sawzaw blade in seconds.  It’s covered inside and out by a wonderful layer of tongue and groove beadboard cedar siding.  It would be a shame to abandon it to the wood pile at the transfer station only to have it ground up for who knows what. 

I spent many moments looking at this garage trying to come up with a game plan on how to save this structure.  I knew it needed a new foundation.  I knew in order to give it the new foundation I had to get the old girl off her feet.  But how was the question.  Then it came to me.  Like millions of aging Americans looking for that second chance at youth, she needed a lift!

I came up with a game plan.  I needed to build a box inside the garage to shore it up and stabilize her.  Once that was done I needed to dig a trench around her and expose old foundation.  With the weight of the structure on the internal box I can then cut the bottom 6” to 8” of the existing framing and pull out the old foundation.  I could then put in a proper concrete footing and stem wall and lower her back down onto her new concrete foundation and she’d be as good as new!  I stood there in the garage marveling at the ingenuity of my plan, then look over my surroundings and though, “this is gonna take me a while.”  But I had a plan that I was enthusiastic about and I knew could work.  Now I just needed to find some material.

My first find was a number of old pallets.  Under the office where I work is a metal fabrication shop.  They get shipments of steel plates on these huge pallets made out of 4x4s and 2x4’s.  They had a stack of them sitting outside their garage door.  When I ask them what they were going to do with them, they said they were destine for the dump!  Another chance to save something from an unnecessary demise.  Hammer and pry bar at the ready, I had those babies broken down and in the back of my truck in an hour’s time. (Not to mention the sweat I broke.  No need for the gym that day).

Scary Foundation!!

Next it was some old fashion dumpster diving.  The company I work for was doing a kitchen remodel on the house that belonged to the parents of a famous Seattle software entrepreneur.  I dug out a number of 2x4's out of the dumpster that were unceremoniously tossed away.  So now I have boards holding up my garage that were once in the walls of the house that one of the richest man in the world grew up in!  Given his and his wife’s commitment to green technology, I’m sure they’re good with it.

Ready with plenty of wood and a box of 3” screws that I had to buy ($12.35) I was ready to go.  But my excitement crashed when I thought, ”Oh shit!  The garage was still full of all my crap!”

I put plenty of thought into how I was going to tear this garage apart and put it together again.   However, many a good projects came crumbling down when logistics were not thought through.  Forethought on site organization, tool and hardware storage and proper staging of building materials so that it is not only accessible but out of the way.  A messy and disorganized construction site can not only slow progress but add huge costs to a project.  I was thinking this golden rule of construction management as I looked in utter discouragement at the mess that faced me.  Like most Americans, my garage is the place where everything one doesn’t want  to deal with at the moment but knows it has to stay dry goes to live.  I put down my box of screws and said to myself, “One step at a time.”  The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, right!   Then thought how I wished my buddy Keith was living nearby.  This step would be easier with another set of willing hands by my side.  But I have made this my own personal crusade.  So alone,  it was onto Craig’s list.

I found a free carport tent in no time.  I actually found 2 damaged carport tents and made one good one out of them. ( I have some extra poles if you need some.)  I thought my organization and storage skills to be quite superior, and I continue to think that.  It took me three solid days, one with my father-in law’s help, but I emptied that garage and packed everything into that carport tent.   I now call it the garage tent.  My old chicken coop now a garden storage shed, left me plenty a room in the garage tent.  (Larry, my father-in law, did an amazing job of assigning all my tools a place and hanging them into the outlined shape of each!)   I modified the tent so I could hang bikes and ladders, made a floor of old pallets to place in shelves with a small workbench between them and then struggled my boat into the tent. (I failed on plotting a wide enough path for the boat trailer to turn into the garage tent).  It was all contained into a neat storage area with easy access to many of my materials.  Now, I could turn my attention to “the box”.

The box is exactly that.  A wood framed box I had to create inside the garage in order to hold it up. I started with hoisting up two 4x4 beams and tying them off into position up against the joists.  I wedged in 4x4’s and 2x4’s in between them and a 2x4 on the slab, plumed and leveled it and VOILA! My box completed.

I could now sleep better knowing my garage has now been stabilized.   I could now cut the garage away from its rotting foundation.   My desire was to have this garage floating free over the foundation.  However, I was concerned by the amount of weight that sat on that roof.  A layer of wood shingles and a couple of layers of asphalt shingle made things heavy enough, but add a couple of square feet of moss and moister from various leaks and you can imagine my concerns.  The roof needed to come down… and come to think of it, so did my deck.  Unfortunately it was time to spend some money.

Time for that to go!

I Saved Some Door Slabs From Certain Death

I forgot to show you my fence!  I love the colors.  I helped the neighbor patch up his shed.

I saved a number of door slabs from certain death today.  Ten feet high, 1-3/4” solid core doors with a wonderful enamel finish.  I asked my wife Dana if I could have $50 to get some materials to build some storage shelves for the basement.  (She’s in charge of the house hold money)  after looking at our account and making a bunch of anxious sighs, she reluctantly approved the release of funds.  That’s when I remembered the doors I saw sitting in a pile waiting for their demise. I took them home, cut them up and turned them into a bunch of shelves.  I get great pleasure in taking someone else’s garbage and giving it a new life.  A new purpose.  Especially when it’s free! 

In our “throw away” culture it is amazing to me to see what is going into our landfills.  Seattle has what they call “transfer stations”.  Basically huge concrete pits about 12’ deep, 100’ wide and about the length of a football field where people back their vehicles up to and toss in their garbage.  (These are not apparently big enough; so two larger ones are currently being built)  A huge bulldozer pushes mobile mountains of trash into a hole where the garbage is compacted and transferred into a container that is then pulled by semi truck to a train yard.  There the container is transferred from the semi onto a train car (by a diesel burning transport lift) were it then enjoys a 5 hour train ride to eastern Oregon.  There it is transferred off the train car by a lift to another semi, pulled to a landfill currently the size of one of the larger mountains in the Cascade range, dumped and spread around by yet another bulldozer.  Talk about a carbon footprint!  That’s 8 fossil fuel burning pieces of equipment just moving our trash from one hole in the ground to another!

On any given day that I head to the pit it’s about a ¼ to ½ full with a colorful array of trash.  I watch one person after another toss in their unwanted items and think to myself, “Wow.  This is one moment of one day and this place is open 360 days out of the year!”  I also think “Wow, look at all that wasted material.”   Here my mood generally darkens at the laziness of people when I see what could be pulled out of the garbage and re-used or recycled.  But I will avoid the preaching.  (I do recommend a great 2o min video that can be found at www.storyofstuff.org I’m a big fan.  Great for video for the kids) But there is a big difference between what is truly “trash”  - i.e. that which really cannot be used again, and waste  - i.e. that which we throw away because we either don’t know what to do with it or we’re to lazy to deal with it.  So into the land fill it goes.   Old doors, furniture, plastic containers, usable wood, old clothes… You name it.

So what’s the point of my observation?  With a little creative ingenuity so much of this stuff can get a second chance at life to be something functional, useful and even beautiful.  

A couple of summers ago, I was involved in the demolition of a house in order to make way for a new house.  It was an awesome experience as we hand deconstruct the house and track every piece of material that came out of it to see where it ended up.  I am happy to say that at least 90% of the house was either re-used or recycled.  Less than 10% of the structure ended up in the landfill.  Bits and pieces went on to live in other structures.  Sadly (or fortunately depending on ones point of view) I was not an owner of a home at the time so I could not dig into the bounty before me.  A bounty of material that was ABSOLUTLY FREE!!  Oh, you can imagine the pains a penny pinching junk collector like myself was feeling as piece after useful piece of that house was hauled away to someplace other than my own back yard! (Which I didn’t have at the time)  

But now I have a house.  One that has endless possibilities for projects both big and small for me to practice my craft of salvaging, scavenging, storing and re-using what may be considered another’s trash.  GIVE ME YOUR JUNK, YOUR TRASH, YOUR UNWANTED ITEMS YEARNING TO BREATH NEW LIFE!!!!  O.K, o.k. I need not get carried away.  I try not to let my yard look like that on Sanford and Son.  But I have started a pretty good collection.

For what you ask?  I have a garage.  A small garage that was built some time in the 1920’s.  It’s pretty damn cute but ready to fall over.  Like a tired old lady still trying to look youthful with some blush and powder on her face.  The past owner put just enough paint on it to make it look adorable enough that I now have an emotional attachment to it. My friends, seeing the rouse keep saying, “Get rid of her!  She’s old and ugly.  Tear her down and build something new”.   But beauty is in the inside, right?  The old girl sill has strong bones and a cozy charm.  So I want to save the old lady and give her a new life.  Not just as a garage, but as a place that all can enjoy the beauty that I see.  As a guesthouse.

With this blog, I invite you to join in my endeavor to turn this leaning, rotting structure into a place I will want to place my guest for a cozy overnight stay.  I realize this is nothing new.  But I want to document my progress on this rehabilitation.  The exciting thing for me though, will be to see how cheap I can do it.  My goal: to fix this up on next to no money with that I find, scavenge and salvage.  I will track every expense and see if I can keep it under $1000.  As I pick up each piece of material and incorporate it into this structure I will be whistling, “Everything old is new again”. 

Ain’t she a beauty?                                   

JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE.