Cleanup Time

An amazing amount of backyard deconstruction has occurred at our house in the past year. Gone are the brick planters that pooled water against the second casita, rotting its siding. The siding is gone, too, and has been replaced. Gone is the very large, hideous fountain. Gone is the rotted Arizona room. Gone are the pointless brick columns that stood in the middle of a long line of prickly pear cacti. Gone, too, are the prickly pears. Dismantled but not gone are the brick pathways.  

(As you can imagine this has required Grant, Blair, and now Dennis, to labor intensively with sledgehammer, chisel, mallet, crow bar, spade, shovel, wheelbarrow and other tools.)

Most of the debris has been hauled away – seven large dumpsters full, to be exact. Still, some lumber, sections of eucalyptus tree that are too large to split, and all of the bricks remained.

Dennis and Grant sorted the bricks and pavers into three huge piles: unsalvageable, clean, and mortar-covered. Over a three-day period the men moved the clean bricks to an area by the driveway, one wheelbarrow full at a time.

Then we had a discussion about what to do with the mortar-covered bricks. Maybe they could be cleaned to reuse as siding on the main house addition, which is currently sided with ugly yellow vinyl. A You Tube video showed a man cleaning mortar off bricks using a hatchet. At a dollar a brick he cleaned twenty bricks in the time it took to make the video. This seemed worth a try, so we bought the cheapest hatchet we could find and a pair of Kevlar gloves. A large section of the eucalyptus tree is serving as workbench.

Again, Dennis wheelbarrows the clean bricks to a new pile near the driveway. (Obviously there's a long way to go before this job is done.)

Yesterday a truck delivered another large dumpster to our driveway. Today was backyard cleanup day. Grant and Dennis started early this morning. They loaded the dumpster first with eucalyptus trunk pieces. Then they loaded the unsalvageable bricks (yep, that wheelbarrow was in the action again). The old lumber was hand carried. 

By four-thirty the job was done.

We still don’t know how to dispose of the remaining gigantic eucalyptus trunk sections. Each must weigh a thousand pounds or more. That aside, we're about ready to have a water management expert come to recommend a plan for water conservation. After that we can have the yard regraded. We're almost on our way to reconstruction.

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer