Construction. Day One

Day one of construction is done.  Gone.  Thank goodness.  I'm pooped.  The day started off somewhat leisurely with attention to the chicklets and alpacas.  Everyone needed food and preparation for the day, including Peter and I.  Cleverly I threw food in the crock pot so we'd have dinner ready when we wanted it.  We began our endeavors by 10:00.

Our construction plan involves a complex chain of events.  Here is a before photo of stage one.

Our plan involves turning the garage into additional living space for the MIL suite. Our plan is to remove the garage door, frame in a wall, add a window, remove the brown door on the end, add a window, re-side the building and build a pergola/patio where those plants are on the end.  On the inside we are going to vault the ceiling, insulate and sheet rock the walls, break out the old concrete and re-pour the floor, topping it with matching hardwood that we put in the rest of the suite last year.  Before we can do any of that we need to remove the parking pad and tree stumps, raise the level of the ground, re-pour cement to include the foundation of the garage and future pergola.  But before we can do that we need to make space for the pile of broken concrete and foundation that we need to break out, as well as the soil we're going to try to sift and salvage.

And that's just stage 1.  

My beloved husband (aka the great time under-estimator) says we can have it done in a couple of weeks.  Bwaa haaa haaa!

Now that you know the plan, here is how day one went.  Peter started clearing a space for the concrete and soil while I started emptying the garage.  Most of the stuff in the garage was not mine so I could not make the judgement call on what to do with it.  I just hauled it out to the parking slab and sorted into piles:  Tools/hardware, garden, wine-making, organic material (like potato starts, cuttings, etc), everything else, hazardous waste (there were cans and cans of unlabeled paints and chemicals) and then a pile for the stuff that probably needs to go to the dump.

By 3:00 the garage was mostly empty, Peter was done with his task and began tackling the chore of sorting through the piles.  He added new piles to my sorting schema and made serious progress.  I turned into his assistant as the decisions being made could not be made by me. The problem was that by the time we finished sorting, nothing was actually put away and it was nearing 9 pm.  We had promised his mother that we would not leave anything on the slab overnight.  She worries about how things look.

Peter stashed the potatoes in the barn, as well as the tools and hardware, while I burned our burn pile.  A few things were put in Peter's mom's van for charity and a few things were put in the SUV for recycling.

Everything else went back into the garage.

EVERYTHING.

(can you hear the crickets chirping?)

At least it's sorted for easy dispersal once the dump, recycling & hazardous waste places open on Monday.  Peter still needs to make some decisions on where to put the things we aren't getting rid of but the hardest part of this section of the plan is over with.  yay.