Bring on the junk

When we cleared the last bits of stuff out of the house in preparation for putting up drywall, we had no place to put it. So Dave and I laid down some boards and plywood over the back lawn, piled up all our junk there, and covered it with a few big tarps (including the big 40' x 60' one we had over the whole house awhile back). Before it got covered, the pile reminded me of that book where a photographer went around the world, getting families to put all their posessions out on their lawns, and then photographed the whole family together with all their stuff. It was humiliating. Such a huge pile of crap (and that's not even counting the stuff we had in storage and the stuff tucked away long ago in the office shed and behind the office shed). Tarp-covered, it was like a big, white dragon, probably ten feet wide and fifteen or twenty feet long, piled about 5 feet high on average.

So it was with mixed feelings that Dave and I uncovered this stuff and dragged a lot of it back into the house last weekend. It turns out a lot of this is not truly crap (cutting boards, kitchen pots, and other useful things) but there is still a *lot* of it. We didn't even manage to get everything inside, but the remaining pile is at least a more manageable 10' x 10' square.

To the left you can see another pile of stuff covered with a blue tarp. That's lumber salvaged from the old house--mostly planks from the old roof, but also moulding and baseboard from inside the house. This pile is also about 15'-20' long but only about 3' high and 5' wide. This past week, Efren has been pulling baseboard and moulding out of the pile, cleaning it up, and installing it in various places around the house.


(March 13, 2006)