tearing down a house - November 12, 2007
Tearing down a house
Answered an ad, decided to move on it. Sure, I’ll tear it down, long as I get to keep what I want from it. Wood. I’d rather do this than pay the lumber yard. I hate seeing dumpsters full of good lumber. I need it, I’m working on a place of my own, in the mountains, tight budget, you understand.
I arrived early in the morning. Had four days, two days off from work plus the weekend. I brought my tools, a hammer, couple of crowbars, wire snips, sledge hammer, ladder, screwdrivers, flat shovel.
The owner and I shook hands, chatted a bit. The sun was just breaking over the eastern part of town. The house was small, eight hundred square feet or so, sway backed, limp and crooked, ready to come down. A house like this, in a town like this, isn’t much. There are thousands of them, side by side, really just made of sticks. What do I do first?
Tear out all the sheetrock. Pry off and kick aside the molding, strip from the walls small items left in the rooms, a postcard picture of Jesus, a baseball card, some broken beads. The molding around each door frame needs to be pulled, and around every window. Tedious work. Later, when I’m too tired to care, my heart will yearn for destruction on the grand scale, the bull dozer or the wrecking ball, to see the whole thing come down in a pile of splinters and broken glass, but I am not bothered yet by this meticulous, piecemeal, effort—it has a rhythm, a pattern I follow, a checklist of things to do and a running account of materials I am saving. Long stringers of molding lie on the ground, catch at my boots, trip me. I can use those, I say to myself, or sell them. The fragments of sheet rock need to be thrown out: break that widow, chuck it all outside. This takes time. I’ve got a hip high pile of gypsum shards from the walls of the two bedrooms. I take them one and two at a time to the window and throw them to the ground. The grass is still wet with dew. Dust hangs thickly in the air. I forgot to bring a facemask. I put my head out the window to breathe clean air. An hour goes by in cleaning up the rooms before I can get to work again.
I’d planned to rip out all the sheetrock by noon. It takes all morning, however, just to strip the walls. Then I begin with the ceiling rock. This is problematic: The attic is smothered in a foot of blown insulation, a mess of dry, dusty pulverized newspaper. I improvise a plan as I begin to break into the ceiling and stand on the ladder with my head in the darkness of the attic while I drag the fluff into garbage bags. First I try the snow shovel, but it is too wide to fit between the rafters. Then I use the heavy flat shovel, but I find the long handle too awkward to maneuver in the tight space. I then hook a garbage bag on bent nails over two rafters and pull the insulation with my hands into the bag. This works fairly well, but there is a lot of material, and my nose is already caked in black dust. I peer around the attic. At this rate I’ll be up here two days.
I climb into the attic and kick at the sheetrock from above. Huge sections smash to the floor as dust fills the room below. I am inspired. I hack at more of the ceiling with the shovel and watch the wreckage accumulate at the foot of the ladder. Then I climb down quickly to run outside and clear my lungs. I sneeze and spit black dust. My eyes are also crusted in dirt. I spend the rest of the day pulling and chopping at the ceiling until most of the sheet rock has clattered to the ground and the insulation covers the floor like drifts of black snow around my knees.
I fill thirty or so heavy garbage bags with insulation, and make a respectable pile of torn sheetrock outside. The sun goes down. From outside the house looks the same as it did in the morning.
The next day I arrive with a glad heart—I’ll be working outside much of the day. I plan to take down the roof. Rip out all the shingles, throw them to the ground. Lift the four by eight OSB wood panels, save as much as I can of those, then knock the rafters loose and harvest all that 2x6 lumber.
I am slowed at once by the television aerial. The stays are wound tightly to eyebolts set deeply into the roof members. It takes a couple hours to get the thing down. I can’t get the bolts to loosen on the pole that would allow me to collapse each telescoped section straight down into the larger base pole, so I lower the whole tower like a mast from one corner, clutching a mess of cables in my gloved hands, until the weight threatens to pull me from the roof, and I let the antenna crash to the front yard.
The owner comes out to work at detaching the antenna from the mast. He wants to use it on his new house.
I start right away on the roof. Asphalt shingles and aluminum nails. Slow hot work with a flat shovel. Nothing comes up easy. There’s more under the first layer. The nails resist. The palms of my hand smash again and again against the handle end. The sun rises. It is a hot October day.
I climb down, drive to the convenience store down the road, buy two large bottles of sports drink, and a six pack of beer. I drink two beers at once in the car. Back on the roof the battle goes on most of the afternoon. By four I have stripped all the shingles and shoved them off the edge of the house to the refuse pile. My arms quiver with fatigue. I climb down to bring up new tools. I set to work at once on removing the pressed board sheathing. I use my heavy crowbar to get under one edge, pry up and work around the edges this way until I am able to lift the sheet. But nothing goes as planned. The nails do not lift, but hold and tear through the wood instead. It is a cheap, lightweight type of OSB panel, and I can break sections of it in my hands. I try using the cat’s paw to pry each individual nail but the brittle wood breaks under the head of the tool and the nails, two and a half inch galvanized, often as not remain unmoved. I finally despair of saving any of the panels and begin to rip them up with the crowbar much as I did with the sheetrock yesterday, breaking the sheathing off in chunks. However, this takes much more effort than the sheetrock did, I do not have the aid of gravity since I must lift upwards, and the wood breaks only after I throw all the strength of my arms, legs and back into the endeavor. By sundown I have removed only half of the sheathing. The rest will wait until tomorrow, along with the original1 by 10 planks that lay under the OSB panels with all of their rusted nails. The house still stands.
So far I’ve spent over a hundred on gas and food, since I’ve come all the way out here from SF, and I’ve driven a load of framing materials up to my place in the Sierras. I’ve consumed mostly candy and doughnuts and beer, one breakfast at Denny’s, the “French Toast Slam,” a puddle of maple syrup and creamed butter on the toast, mixed all together with scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, the same torpedo shaped sausage I’ve eaten in places like this since I was a kid working on jobs much like this with my dad.
We’d taken down a house like this together, after I’d graduated from high school, and before I’d decided to go to college. The house was in Delhi, another Central
Valley town like hundreds of others on Highway 99. Heat and dust, dairy farms, foxtails and black widow spiders. My dad was “in real estate”, at the broken down end. We tore the whole place down and found nothing really of use, all the wood brittle or rotten, the siding worthless, the framing cracked and shattered. We cut all the wood into pieces for the wood burning stove at home. Dad and his brothers built a new house there on the lot. All around the place were weeds, sand and dairy farms. The sun rose pink and orange on the Sierras when we started work in the morning, and set in shades of lavender and red on the Coast Range when we got back into his Toyota pickup and headed for home. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but it wasn’t going to be this.
The next morning I ache all over, drink an extra cup of coffee and arrive much later than usual—8:30 or so. The owner has been working already, filling a trailer and pickup truck with trash bags and broken sheetrock. We exchange nods, and I climb up onto the roof. The same slow difficult work takes all morning, until all the sheathing has been ripped off and sent spiraling to the trash pile. I then sit in the sun and pull nails one by one from the cracked pine boards that formed the original roof. I lose track of time. I look out across the run-down neighborhood, at the other tract houses spread out in all directions, crooked and tired. My hands grow numb. I am wearing a cowboy hat, and my hair is matted and wet under it. Not until the sun is low in the west have I pried the last board from the 2x6 rafters and I stand with my feet balanced carefully on two different ceiling joists. The whole construct is weak now. I can shake the entire house by swaying side to side. I am tired, sore, dirty, and somewhat in a bad mood: I have one day left to take down piece by piece all the framing materials to the foundation, load it all up with its bristling skin of nails and haul it to my place in the mountains.
I begin gently pulling nails from each connection of the framing, loosening 2x4s and 2x6s one at a time, trying to save as much wood from cracking as possible. I start at one end of the house. It goes slowly. My forearms ache. The work is precarious: I stand at the top of the ladder and swing with the hammer, holding the crowbar in the other hand while leaning on a secure beam for support. I soon progress to swinging the sledgehammer at tough sections, sacrificing some ends of the timbers. I go a little faster. The sun sets. I have a periodic cramp in my arm muscles. I shake them and move on. A pile of wood begins to grow on the floor and another out on the lawn. The house loses its shape. In the dusk I continue to work, in a good rhythm now, a bit light-headed and tired, but happy to be making such progress. The last roof truss is coming down. I free it from the exterior wall end, lift it into the air still attached to the peak, and swing it to one side, thinking it would pull itself free by its own weight and fall away from me. It holds at the connection above, however, flies away from me at first, then it flings itself back towards me, with one clean long nail glinting at the end. It misses my face and falls directly downward, landing on the top of the boot on my left foot. I am relieved at first that I will have nothing more than a bruise. A moment later, though, I see the top of my leather boot redden with dark blood, and decide I’d better take a break. This is what happens when you get tired and sloppy, I remember. In the cab of my truck, I remove the boot, and find my sock to be soaked in blood. I peel it off: my foot is oddly misshapen, the top engorged to twice its size with a softball-sized blister full of blood ballooning between the toes and ankle. There is a neat black hole at the middle of it, with nothing but a clear dribble oozing from it. I grip the foot in both hands to squeeze blood out of the hole. Only a little trickle of red comes forth. I rifle through my glove compartment for the white athletic tape I’d put there just the day before in case of some emergency, and with bloodied fingers claw at the tape, pulling out a long strip that I wrap tightly around my foot, trying to compress the swelling and stop the internal bleeding. I fear I might have punctured a major vein in the foot. I layer the tape and get the foot back to a recognizable shape. I reach to the back seat and find the half bottle of beer I’d left from lunch time, drink all of that down, then put back on the wet sock and boot. I have to considerably loosen the laces to get it over the swelling. I sigh, look at the setting sun, and go back to the house.
With continued wild swinging of the sledge hammer I was able to bring down the roof structure, tear out many of the wall studs while still leaving most of the siding hanging from corner timbers, and wrench free most of the aluminum framed windows. The glass panes shattered as I twisted and tore at the frames with my crowbar. I’d decided not to save the windows.
I’d come to the wood that was the point of all this work, the oak flooring. It was ¾ inch tongue and groove. I found it came up quite painlessly, though a bit slowly. I slipped the big crow bar under a piece, lifted along the edge until it began to ease off the sub-floor. I pried upwards and towards myself at the same time so as not to crack the tongue. I lost a few boards but most came up nicely. I soon had a stack of random lengths bristling with nails. At dusk I loaded what boards I’d taken from the building into my truck. I had one day left.
The next morning I went quickly to work, ripping the thin, brittle redwood siding from the studs, pulling up the flooring, taking down the sides of the building that I’d left standing with their 2x6 roof rafters. On these I incurred a further injury: the ladder I’d placed a bit too far out from the wall slipped when I stood at the top rung prying at the electric supply pole. I felt the legs of the ladder give way and grabbed the roof joist just in time to keep from falling to the floor, but my skins banged against a lower rung of the ladder as it clattered downward, and I felt as if someone had swung a bat at my lower legs. Bruises and swelling appeared quite quickly on my shins. I danced around in pain for a moment, cursing under my breath. My forearms were also hurt, scraped in the process of clinging to the wall. I rubbed my legs, then propped the ladder up again and went back to freeing the electrical supply from the house. I stabilized the box and pole with a tripod made of 2x4s I pull from the debris pile. I looked back at the house; still so much to do.
At the end of the fourth day the pile of wood in the front yard is higher than my head. There are stacks of 2x4s and 2x6s, sheets of plywood, pipes and planks from the roof. There are five doors lying together to one side. The sub-floor still lies attached to the foundation. I speak for a while with the owner. I cannot finish today. We agree that I’ll come back next weekend with a larger truck. That should do it.
I spend the week at work, teaching, talking to kids, my swollen foot elevated at home, after a visit to the doctor and a tetanus shot. My shins are warm and sore. I make arrangements for the truck.
On Saturday I arrive at the pile of rubble with a 24foot flatbed truck, twin diesel tanks, the wheels almost as high as my hip. I spend the morning prying loose the tongue and groove sub-floor, more of what I’d come for. I then whack free the 2x6 beams that rest on cement pilings under the whole house. I am done demolishing things. I spend the rest of the day, till darkness falls, loading the truck with all I can. I leave behind wood too full of nails or too shattered to use. The truck is full up higher than the pickets. There is still a large pile of 2x4s and various lumber, doors, and fragments of siding on the lawn, but I am exhausted. I still need to drive 150 miles to the Sierras to unload the lumber and return the truck by morning. I speak with the owner again. He is disappointed that I can’t take it all away, but understands, and sees clearly what I am up against. He has not had to pay me for any of this work. The deal is done, I drive away. I now sit, two days later, typing this account. The wood is piled outside, waiting for me to stack it neatly behind the cabin. I have my leg close to the woodstove; the heat feels good on the tender skin. I read the New Yorker, an article about sand tar in Canada, about the ultimate harm and net financial loss of this industry when taking in all the “externals:” air, water, soil. The industry is subsidized. Government helps out; good for them. I wonder, what about this work I’ve just done? Haven’t I contributed a something when all the “externals” are considered? The wood recovered, trees spared, landfill space untaken?
I am tired; I have done something that took me to the edge of my endurance. I’ll tell my students and they’ll laugh, what a waste of time. Well, I don’t know. What isn’t a waste of time? I worked hard, my body is sore, I watched a few sunsets while I worked, I drank good cold beer, I got something definite done. I took down a house with my hands. Now I have some wood to use later. There have been many, many days when I’ve been paid more (well sure, I’ve been paid nothing for this), but done much less. “How about you guys,” I’ll say. “What did you do this weekend?”
(c)andypadlo2007
Answered an ad, decided to move on it. Sure, I’ll tear it down, long as I get to keep what I want from it. Wood. I’d rather do this than pay the lumber yard. I hate seeing dumpsters full of good lumber. I need it, I’m working on a place of my own, in the mountains, tight budget, you understand.
I arrived early in the morning. Had four days, two days off from work plus the weekend. I brought my tools, a hammer, couple of crowbars, wire snips, sledge hammer, ladder, screwdrivers, flat shovel.
The owner and I shook hands, chatted a bit. The sun was just breaking over the eastern part of town. The house was small, eight hundred square feet or so, sway backed, limp and crooked, ready to come down. A house like this, in a town like this, isn’t much. There are thousands of them, side by side, really just made of sticks. What do I do first?
Tear out all the sheetrock. Pry off and kick aside the molding, strip from the walls small items left in the rooms, a postcard picture of Jesus, a baseball card, some broken beads. The molding around each door frame needs to be pulled, and around every window. Tedious work. Later, when I’m too tired to care, my heart will yearn for destruction on the grand scale, the bull dozer or the wrecking ball, to see the whole thing come down in a pile of splinters and broken glass, but I am not bothered yet by this meticulous, piecemeal, effort—it has a rhythm, a pattern I follow, a checklist of things to do and a running account of materials I am saving. Long stringers of molding lie on the ground, catch at my boots, trip me. I can use those, I say to myself, or sell them. The fragments of sheet rock need to be thrown out: break that widow, chuck it all outside. This takes time. I’ve got a hip high pile of gypsum shards from the walls of the two bedrooms. I take them one and two at a time to the window and throw them to the ground. The grass is still wet with dew. Dust hangs thickly in the air. I forgot to bring a facemask. I put my head out the window to breathe clean air. An hour goes by in cleaning up the rooms before I can get to work again.
I’d planned to rip out all the sheetrock by noon. It takes all morning, however, just to strip the walls. Then I begin with the ceiling rock. This is problematic: The attic is smothered in a foot of blown insulation, a mess of dry, dusty pulverized newspaper. I improvise a plan as I begin to break into the ceiling and stand on the ladder with my head in the darkness of the attic while I drag the fluff into garbage bags. First I try the snow shovel, but it is too wide to fit between the rafters. Then I use the heavy flat shovel, but I find the long handle too awkward to maneuver in the tight space. I then hook a garbage bag on bent nails over two rafters and pull the insulation with my hands into the bag. This works fairly well, but there is a lot of material, and my nose is already caked in black dust. I peer around the attic. At this rate I’ll be up here two days.
I climb into the attic and kick at the sheetrock from above. Huge sections smash to the floor as dust fills the room below. I am inspired. I hack at more of the ceiling with the shovel and watch the wreckage accumulate at the foot of the ladder. Then I climb down quickly to run outside and clear my lungs. I sneeze and spit black dust. My eyes are also crusted in dirt. I spend the rest of the day pulling and chopping at the ceiling until most of the sheet rock has clattered to the ground and the insulation covers the floor like drifts of black snow around my knees.
I fill thirty or so heavy garbage bags with insulation, and make a respectable pile of torn sheetrock outside. The sun goes down. From outside the house looks the same as it did in the morning.
The next day I arrive with a glad heart—I’ll be working outside much of the day. I plan to take down the roof. Rip out all the shingles, throw them to the ground. Lift the four by eight OSB wood panels, save as much as I can of those, then knock the rafters loose and harvest all that 2x6 lumber.
I am slowed at once by the television aerial. The stays are wound tightly to eyebolts set deeply into the roof members. It takes a couple hours to get the thing down. I can’t get the bolts to loosen on the pole that would allow me to collapse each telescoped section straight down into the larger base pole, so I lower the whole tower like a mast from one corner, clutching a mess of cables in my gloved hands, until the weight threatens to pull me from the roof, and I let the antenna crash to the front yard.
The owner comes out to work at detaching the antenna from the mast. He wants to use it on his new house.
I start right away on the roof. Asphalt shingles and aluminum nails. Slow hot work with a flat shovel. Nothing comes up easy. There’s more under the first layer. The nails resist. The palms of my hand smash again and again against the handle end. The sun rises. It is a hot October day.
I climb down, drive to the convenience store down the road, buy two large bottles of sports drink, and a six pack of beer. I drink two beers at once in the car. Back on the roof the battle goes on most of the afternoon. By four I have stripped all the shingles and shoved them off the edge of the house to the refuse pile. My arms quiver with fatigue. I climb down to bring up new tools. I set to work at once on removing the pressed board sheathing. I use my heavy crowbar to get under one edge, pry up and work around the edges this way until I am able to lift the sheet. But nothing goes as planned. The nails do not lift, but hold and tear through the wood instead. It is a cheap, lightweight type of OSB panel, and I can break sections of it in my hands. I try using the cat’s paw to pry each individual nail but the brittle wood breaks under the head of the tool and the nails, two and a half inch galvanized, often as not remain unmoved. I finally despair of saving any of the panels and begin to rip them up with the crowbar much as I did with the sheetrock yesterday, breaking the sheathing off in chunks. However, this takes much more effort than the sheetrock did, I do not have the aid of gravity since I must lift upwards, and the wood breaks only after I throw all the strength of my arms, legs and back into the endeavor. By sundown I have removed only half of the sheathing. The rest will wait until tomorrow, along with the original1 by 10 planks that lay under the OSB panels with all of their rusted nails. The house still stands.
So far I’ve spent over a hundred on gas and food, since I’ve come all the way out here from SF, and I’ve driven a load of framing materials up to my place in the Sierras. I’ve consumed mostly candy and doughnuts and beer, one breakfast at Denny’s, the “French Toast Slam,” a puddle of maple syrup and creamed butter on the toast, mixed all together with scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, the same torpedo shaped sausage I’ve eaten in places like this since I was a kid working on jobs much like this with my dad.
We’d taken down a house like this together, after I’d graduated from high school, and before I’d decided to go to college. The house was in Delhi, another Central
Valley town like hundreds of others on Highway 99. Heat and dust, dairy farms, foxtails and black widow spiders. My dad was “in real estate”, at the broken down end. We tore the whole place down and found nothing really of use, all the wood brittle or rotten, the siding worthless, the framing cracked and shattered. We cut all the wood into pieces for the wood burning stove at home. Dad and his brothers built a new house there on the lot. All around the place were weeds, sand and dairy farms. The sun rose pink and orange on the Sierras when we started work in the morning, and set in shades of lavender and red on the Coast Range when we got back into his Toyota pickup and headed for home. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but it wasn’t going to be this.
The next morning I ache all over, drink an extra cup of coffee and arrive much later than usual—8:30 or so. The owner has been working already, filling a trailer and pickup truck with trash bags and broken sheetrock. We exchange nods, and I climb up onto the roof. The same slow difficult work takes all morning, until all the sheathing has been ripped off and sent spiraling to the trash pile. I then sit in the sun and pull nails one by one from the cracked pine boards that formed the original roof. I lose track of time. I look out across the run-down neighborhood, at the other tract houses spread out in all directions, crooked and tired. My hands grow numb. I am wearing a cowboy hat, and my hair is matted and wet under it. Not until the sun is low in the west have I pried the last board from the 2x6 rafters and I stand with my feet balanced carefully on two different ceiling joists. The whole construct is weak now. I can shake the entire house by swaying side to side. I am tired, sore, dirty, and somewhat in a bad mood: I have one day left to take down piece by piece all the framing materials to the foundation, load it all up with its bristling skin of nails and haul it to my place in the mountains.
I begin gently pulling nails from each connection of the framing, loosening 2x4s and 2x6s one at a time, trying to save as much wood from cracking as possible. I start at one end of the house. It goes slowly. My forearms ache. The work is precarious: I stand at the top of the ladder and swing with the hammer, holding the crowbar in the other hand while leaning on a secure beam for support. I soon progress to swinging the sledgehammer at tough sections, sacrificing some ends of the timbers. I go a little faster. The sun sets. I have a periodic cramp in my arm muscles. I shake them and move on. A pile of wood begins to grow on the floor and another out on the lawn. The house loses its shape. In the dusk I continue to work, in a good rhythm now, a bit light-headed and tired, but happy to be making such progress. The last roof truss is coming down. I free it from the exterior wall end, lift it into the air still attached to the peak, and swing it to one side, thinking it would pull itself free by its own weight and fall away from me. It holds at the connection above, however, flies away from me at first, then it flings itself back towards me, with one clean long nail glinting at the end. It misses my face and falls directly downward, landing on the top of the boot on my left foot. I am relieved at first that I will have nothing more than a bruise. A moment later, though, I see the top of my leather boot redden with dark blood, and decide I’d better take a break. This is what happens when you get tired and sloppy, I remember. In the cab of my truck, I remove the boot, and find my sock to be soaked in blood. I peel it off: my foot is oddly misshapen, the top engorged to twice its size with a softball-sized blister full of blood ballooning between the toes and ankle. There is a neat black hole at the middle of it, with nothing but a clear dribble oozing from it. I grip the foot in both hands to squeeze blood out of the hole. Only a little trickle of red comes forth. I rifle through my glove compartment for the white athletic tape I’d put there just the day before in case of some emergency, and with bloodied fingers claw at the tape, pulling out a long strip that I wrap tightly around my foot, trying to compress the swelling and stop the internal bleeding. I fear I might have punctured a major vein in the foot. I layer the tape and get the foot back to a recognizable shape. I reach to the back seat and find the half bottle of beer I’d left from lunch time, drink all of that down, then put back on the wet sock and boot. I have to considerably loosen the laces to get it over the swelling. I sigh, look at the setting sun, and go back to the house.
With continued wild swinging of the sledge hammer I was able to bring down the roof structure, tear out many of the wall studs while still leaving most of the siding hanging from corner timbers, and wrench free most of the aluminum framed windows. The glass panes shattered as I twisted and tore at the frames with my crowbar. I’d decided not to save the windows.
I’d come to the wood that was the point of all this work, the oak flooring. It was ¾ inch tongue and groove. I found it came up quite painlessly, though a bit slowly. I slipped the big crow bar under a piece, lifted along the edge until it began to ease off the sub-floor. I pried upwards and towards myself at the same time so as not to crack the tongue. I lost a few boards but most came up nicely. I soon had a stack of random lengths bristling with nails. At dusk I loaded what boards I’d taken from the building into my truck. I had one day left.
The next morning I went quickly to work, ripping the thin, brittle redwood siding from the studs, pulling up the flooring, taking down the sides of the building that I’d left standing with their 2x6 roof rafters. On these I incurred a further injury: the ladder I’d placed a bit too far out from the wall slipped when I stood at the top rung prying at the electric supply pole. I felt the legs of the ladder give way and grabbed the roof joist just in time to keep from falling to the floor, but my skins banged against a lower rung of the ladder as it clattered downward, and I felt as if someone had swung a bat at my lower legs. Bruises and swelling appeared quite quickly on my shins. I danced around in pain for a moment, cursing under my breath. My forearms were also hurt, scraped in the process of clinging to the wall. I rubbed my legs, then propped the ladder up again and went back to freeing the electrical supply from the house. I stabilized the box and pole with a tripod made of 2x4s I pull from the debris pile. I looked back at the house; still so much to do.
At the end of the fourth day the pile of wood in the front yard is higher than my head. There are stacks of 2x4s and 2x6s, sheets of plywood, pipes and planks from the roof. There are five doors lying together to one side. The sub-floor still lies attached to the foundation. I speak for a while with the owner. I cannot finish today. We agree that I’ll come back next weekend with a larger truck. That should do it.
I spend the week at work, teaching, talking to kids, my swollen foot elevated at home, after a visit to the doctor and a tetanus shot. My shins are warm and sore. I make arrangements for the truck.
On Saturday I arrive at the pile of rubble with a 24foot flatbed truck, twin diesel tanks, the wheels almost as high as my hip. I spend the morning prying loose the tongue and groove sub-floor, more of what I’d come for. I then whack free the 2x6 beams that rest on cement pilings under the whole house. I am done demolishing things. I spend the rest of the day, till darkness falls, loading the truck with all I can. I leave behind wood too full of nails or too shattered to use. The truck is full up higher than the pickets. There is still a large pile of 2x4s and various lumber, doors, and fragments of siding on the lawn, but I am exhausted. I still need to drive 150 miles to the Sierras to unload the lumber and return the truck by morning. I speak with the owner again. He is disappointed that I can’t take it all away, but understands, and sees clearly what I am up against. He has not had to pay me for any of this work. The deal is done, I drive away. I now sit, two days later, typing this account. The wood is piled outside, waiting for me to stack it neatly behind the cabin. I have my leg close to the woodstove; the heat feels good on the tender skin. I read the New Yorker, an article about sand tar in Canada, about the ultimate harm and net financial loss of this industry when taking in all the “externals:” air, water, soil. The industry is subsidized. Government helps out; good for them. I wonder, what about this work I’ve just done? Haven’t I contributed a something when all the “externals” are considered? The wood recovered, trees spared, landfill space untaken?
I am tired; I have done something that took me to the edge of my endurance. I’ll tell my students and they’ll laugh, what a waste of time. Well, I don’t know. What isn’t a waste of time? I worked hard, my body is sore, I watched a few sunsets while I worked, I drank good cold beer, I got something definite done. I took down a house with my hands. Now I have some wood to use later. There have been many, many days when I’ve been paid more (well sure, I’ve been paid nothing for this), but done much less. “How about you guys,” I’ll say. “What did you do this weekend?”
(c)andypadlo2007