Day Nineteen: Demo'd out but demo's done

I finally got down to three 4x8 ten + feet long redwood beams suspended eight feet in the air by four 4x4's. Two of the beams were attached to the house. My challenge was to get them down without having them crash down and damage something. I moved all the miscellaneous stuff form under them and from the surrounding area, which was made more difficult by a fifteen gallon bin that had at least ten gallons of rain water in it. Since I had to empty some of the water to move it, I watered my potted plants with the rain water from the bin. (I don't have any potted plants indoors. These were all outdoors and because of a few deaths are fewer than they used to be.)

Then I got tired of hitting my head on the low over hang of the bottle bushes from my neighbor's yard and figured that I might as well get rid of them. So I chopped as much as I could along the fence line and put the residue into the green bin. I was really doing this for the truck unload, which I still didn't get to.

I planned it all out. I took all the screws out from the braces that connected the beams and posts together and particularly from the brackets that connected the beams to house. Then all I had to do was crowbar the beams apart far enough for the clinching nails to pull out. I went back and forth trying to make sure to drop just one beam. Well, as it turned out, the supporting 4x4's were only anchored into the concrete with plastic expansion sleeves with the size screws that you might use in drywall. When I dropped one end of the crossing beam, the posts pulled out of the concrete and fell onto each other, NOT ME.

They didn't mark up the house. They didn't break the sliding door glass. They didn't take out the fence. I just had a lot of nails to pop out and heavy wood to stack. I'm glad I'm lucky because my plan certainly didn't work. Speaking of work, I still have a lot of work to do, but I was enjoying the amount of leisure I was interspersing with the work, including two long weekends in a row. Even though today was a lot of physical work, I am enjoying the kind of work that I'm doing in this Life after Layoff.

Still, I hope tomorrow is a little lighter. Maybe I'll get back to my books.

Hey, I didn't drive at all today. Zero dollars sent to terrorists.