Still more cleanup and prep for the beginning of our new garage shop building but getting much closer. Yesterday turned out to be hottest day of the year but this week is one of the few times that Son and I aren't traveling for work during the summer. One of the final cleanup tasks was removing the remains of an old ramshackle 'smoke house' (generic term for many of the smallish buildings used by the previous generation for summer kitchen, canning kitchen, chicken processing, summer laundry, mudroom sort of things). It should have been demolished years ago but was tucked in too closely to house and carport for this. Once we got the carport moved to it's new location, this opened up plenty of workspace for the 'teacup' (mini-excavator) to work. The 1/2 dozen cherry trees were sacrificed and the building itself smashed into 4 dump truck loads of material which was added to the fire killed tree pile.
After looking at the old building's base, we decided the best plan was an electric jackhammer/concrete breaker since our teacup doesn't have the hydraulic capacity to handle a a similar hydraulic driven attachment. $110 for 24 hours seemed reasonable so Grouch Attack headed out to pick one up at the local(only 40 miles away) rental place while I went the other direction to move hay bales out to the road for loading on a buyer's trailer. When I returned, she was back with a tool I couldn't even lift. OMG I wasn't expecting THIS. Son already knew about the problem and arrived later but w/o Grandson who I had expected to be the cornerstone of the jackhammer process. After about 1/2 hour on the tool, Son was soaked and made the call to Gson for backup.
I had to go back and load hay so missed the final push to complete the project but apparently no one died and the concrete is broken into mini-X sized pieces for loading. Not sure what the old man who did the concrete was thinking but in places it was 12-15" thick. GEEZ, you could have built a 3 story building on that base. I'm guessing 3-4 dump truck loads of broken concrete under a 12'x12' shed.
After looking at the old building's base, we decided the best plan was an electric jackhammer/concrete breaker since our teacup doesn't have the hydraulic capacity to handle a a similar hydraulic driven attachment. $110 for 24 hours seemed reasonable so Grouch Attack headed out to pick one up at the local(only 40 miles away) rental place while I went the other direction to move hay bales out to the road for loading on a buyer's trailer. When I returned, she was back with a tool I couldn't even lift. OMG I wasn't expecting THIS. Son already knew about the problem and arrived later but w/o Grandson who I had expected to be the cornerstone of the jackhammer process. After about 1/2 hour on the tool, Son was soaked and made the call to Gson for backup.
I had to go back and load hay so missed the final push to complete the project but apparently no one died and the concrete is broken into mini-X sized pieces for loading. Not sure what the old man who did the concrete was thinking but in places it was 12-15" thick. GEEZ, you could have built a 3 story building on that base. I'm guessing 3-4 dump truck loads of broken concrete under a 12'x12' shed.
