garage

I am not in the mood to be cheerful about things. I'll give you updates on some annoying stuff.

You've all been driven crazy by the suspense of wondering what is going on with our interminable garage re-build, I know.

We are, I hope, approaching the home stretch of our "four week" job which began in November.

Concrete poured.

Note stupid black plastic draped between stakes all around beside and behind garage. I believe the principle behind this is to prevent eroding dirt from running into the drains and ultimately the river. All well and good, BUT -- on our property the plastic was only put UPHILL of the excavation..................... Nothing to stop the dirt from running down hill into the street, drains, river.

So the main function of the black plastic was to trip us. Feh.











Concrete walk poured in front, too. Pre-fab step.

Note continuing theme of gatorade bottles tossed by concrete crew........ Charming.






You may recall that our back stoop was rotten, so we agreed that they should rebuild it. When they poured concrete, they did pour a stoop. It is 6" higher than the walk out to the garage and ... 12" down from the threshold.................

When we said that was utterly unacceptable, the response was to put a prefab step on top of the too-low stoop.

Hmmm. Better on the way in, probably, but on the way out? NOT. I nearly killed myself stepping out, carrying something, turning to lock the door........ Nope, we really need to step out onto a large area, not a step.

We managed to muscle the prefab step off the stoop, put it in front of the stoop, and then we put the wooden temporary stoop that we used all winter on top of the new low concrete stoop. This set of heights is ok. Now we "just" have to make them come back and raise the level of stoop 5 or 6 inches. In concrete.






And of course there are still gutters to put on the garage, and a number of other smaller issues.


I'm sure it's a mark of my laughable naivete, but I have been surprised by the amount of trash everywhere. The old garage had one (1) window, in the door out to the back yard. Yet there is broken glass EVERYWHERE around the garage. Nails. Screws. Hunks of concrete.

So far I'm not aware of the dogs injuring themselves on staples, nails sticking up out of pieces of wood (good old Dr. Scholls and I found that, and he protected me as always), but..................................

Guess how eager I am to ever have anyone touch the house again, EVER..........



Here are a bunch of screws I picked up. I liked they way they looked after a rain, sitting on the fence outside the back door.