Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Side Trip - Lumber and The Well

One side story to the cabin.

One week Daniel worked in Greenville. The highway to Greenville was being widened into a divided highway and he noticed that they were tearing down some houses to accomplish this.

That weekend we worked in Blue Ridge but after lunch we grabbed our tools and drove out that way.

Most of the houses that we passed were just piles of broken lumber, but on one we passed, the floor was pretty much intact just lying on top of the rest of the house. Of course, as we drove by, another man was already there poking around, so we went on by. As we neared Greenville, we could see smoke and as we got to the last house, there was a construction guy there burning it. Nothing else looked promising so we turned around and headed back. As we got near the one house we were interested in, we noticed the guy was gone, so we pulled over.

Daniel got out and started busting up the floorboards with his sledgehammer so we could salvage the beams. As he did that I walked to the next house (pile of rubble) and salvaged a couple of 2 X 4s. As I walked back to load them in the truck, I noticed the other man was back talking to Daniel. He was an older retired man, named James, and we visited with him a few minutes. He was very nice. ((the darker vertical boards in the picture are the salvaged boards))

He helped Daniel break up some of the floorboards, as I went back to the other house and picked up a few miscellaneous bricks. He noticed my bricks and pointed us to another house farther down and said it had lots of bricks laying around everywhere down there.

After he left Daniel and I loaded up the lumber. We got ten or eleven 2 X 8s in all and they were all 13 feet long. Really nice boards, however they stuck way out of the back of the truck. While Daniel was securing them with tiestraps I tied a bright orange glove to the end of them so people would notice they stuck out. (Daniel laughed)

On our way back to Blue Ridge, Daniel stopped at the "brickhouse" and I immediately began loading bricks into the back of the truck. Daniel (always thinkin) noticed a gaping hole in the ground and went to investigate.

There was a fairly deep brick lined well that the construction workers had evidently uncovered. And they just left it uncovered for anybody to wander up on! It was creepy because it wasn't just a straight column -- at the bottom it was bulbous (like a thermometer). Daniel and I took some pictures and got out of there before we tried to throw each other in.

1 comment:

  1. Hi- Sandra here from HappyTexasFarm.
    Thanks for visiting and commenting on my blog. Sound like you are on a similar adventure to ours. BEST OF LUCK!
    I am very much looking forward to getting underway with our house building project as well. We are building small too...the tentative plan is 900 square feet. I refer to it as the "cobbage". A Cottage/Hobbit style- LOL. I look forward to checking in on your blog to see how you're progressing! I'll take inspiration anywhere I can get it. ;-)
    All the Best,
    Sandra B

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