In Which We Demolish Even More Stuff

Seriously. I should consider renaming this whole blog just that. Or maybe that could be the new tag-line! "21 House: In Which We Demolish Stuff"! I kind of like it. It's so...true.

Anyhow, last weekend was an "at home" weekend (meaning we stayed put instead of hoofing it down to Oregon, as we have been known to do) and so, of course, it was a super productive one. What did we tear down now, you ask? Well, remember this guy:

Come to think of it, you might not really remember him all that well, since I do my best to not include him in many pictures. In fact, Denny and I have so far been repressing the fact that he exists at all. At least, until last weekend when I went outside and saw this...

It appears that all at once Denny got fed up with looking at the Ugly Shed and began to rip it apart. Literally. He'd already dismantled a couple of walls and was working on removing the roof when I came out, made him stop while I got my camera, and then graciously proceeded to let him continue his demolition.

It took him about thirty seconds to tear off that roof. It was like watching the Flash do construction. Er, de-construction, I mean. And, me? Well, I helped a little. While Denny was momentarily occupied with tearing down the remaining walls, I used this little guy and the drill to remove most of the bolts and nuts holding the roof together (confession time: using a power tool successfully made me feel like a total bad-ass -- there, I said it).

And what I couldn't reach or what was rusted-in got removed like this:

Obviously, I was not to be trusted with this step considering my ability to almost gut myself with a simple butter knife. This is no joke. I just found a cut on my arm, like thirty seconds ago. And I have been sitting in front of my laptop. For hours. So how did that happen, I ask you? Anyway...The next step in our dismantling process was to remove the old, rotted-away foundation. For reasons I will show you in a minute, I elected to...document this portion, instead of actively participating.

Icky, huh? And it gets worse. 'Cause it turns out that the spider colony in the garage was nothing to what was growing under the shed. And I do mean growing. These spiders were the size of small Jack Russel terriers! (Okay, that's somewhat of an exaggeration-- they were more like the size of largish guinea pigs. Seriously. Check it out.)

This was an actual conversation I overheard just before their Very Timely deaths. There may have been more that I missed, though, because Denny and I were squealing like little girls the whole time prior to the SMACK-smacksmacksmack-ing with the shovel. 


Sidenote: I believe "Sheila" and her friend were most likely offspring of the terrible Shelob, given their size.


Sidenote #2: I would like it noted that I am a (somewhat) little girl. Denny is...not. Just sayin'.

The Much-Anticipated Garage Update

Remember those old pictures I showed you of the garage? How it used to look like this?

Then (thanks to one fallen hammer and its replacement—oh, and a little effort from Denny, I guess), for a while it looked like this?

Well, now it looks like this!

You see, a couple of weekends ago, Denny’s parents came up to see the house for the first time and they brought with them a few tools and a lot of desire to help out around the place. Denny’s mom brought up her old mower and by some miracle managed to turn our knee-high, freshly-rained-on yard into this manicured beauty:

(And, no, I didn’t mess with the color saturation on that picture, it just ended up being that gorgeous that day!)

And Denny’s dad helped Denny construct a new workbench in the garage! They built this solid, little bugger in about an hour and a half and, let me tell you, it’s a vast improvement over the old one. For example, instead allowing the green structural beam there to inhibit them, they carefully built around it, like so:

This allowed them to get an extra two and a half feet of useable workspace and helped support the longer bench. It also helped make it possible to move the left end of the bench further away from the fuse box, so now not only is it up to code (always a plus) but I also don’t have to worry (as much) about sticking my hands in spider webs when I go to access the breakers!

Oh, and in case you’re thinking to yourself, “But they got rid of all that storage, those silly geese,” here’s a little comparison of house much space we actually gained by tearing down the old, not-really-all-that-functional shelving.

Before:

After:

That’s a lot of real estate! We probably tripled the amount of actual bench and, since we have plans to install shelving and drawers in the future, we definitely won’t be missing that ratty old spider-infested unit. This is what we hope the bench will look like one day soon:

Only, ya know, not grey, green, and animated. ;)

PS: Like my goofy graphics? I've been using Picnik for my photo editing. It's easy to navigate and way cheaper than buying Photoshop. I highly recommend it, if only because it has a teeth-whitening option for pictures of people. Oh, and the basic version is free, which is pretty cool, too.