Thanks everyone. Living the dream!
One thing that isn’t so dreamy about the place is there is not one single out building of any type. I have absolutely no place except the spare bedroom to keep any tools and HH6 already put her foot down banning that idea. But since there are always mountains of projects I am going to NEED my tools, even just the home repair/construction ones for now. Driving back and forth to storage is a non-option. But not having any place to store them presents a need. A need... for a shed! Not a full on shop or garage, just a relatively simple, dry, somewhat secure hut to keep things I will use.
Miter saw, compressors, hand and yard tools, etc. The biggest hurdle is cost.
In a word, we are BROKE. Not broke like before when ramen noodles were a luxury. Simply feeling the impact of a new home purchase, move, cost to break our apartment lease, etc. So funding a spending spree at Lowe’s is pretty much out of the question. So what to do...?
Scrounge!
THAT I am very good at! And since there isn’t really a time crunch (beyond maybe winter coming), I can put my scrounging skills to work.
Today I did just that and started gathering wood. One nice thing about working for the government is the waste. My job gets a goodly number of pallets and shipping crates in all the time. Not having anything to pull my trailer I’ve been a little hamstrung in what I could carry. Today I kinda said “screw it” and turned poor Walter into a pickup. Well, not literally. I simply mean I put him to work.
First I had to crawl in the back and fight the rear window clips to let the glass drop. The motor/wiring is a disaster but I had to get it down. Walter fought back a lil and took a bite but, in the end, I won.
As my last break of the day arrived I drove around to the back of the building and began loading whatever looked useful. Some wood is simply 1x? pallet wood that I had sawzalled up a couple weeks ago. Mostly it’s 1x4ish and lengths from a couple feet to over 7’. Then there is some plywood and OSB that used to be crates. Most of that is 1/2” and have a border of 1x around it. There is also some “special” wood I was able to hide. The army has a variety of flatbed trailers for many uses, mostly construction (engineer) vehicles. Some of these have wood decking that is some sort of ultra hard wood (think teak or mahogany) though I’m not precisely sure what species it is. It’s all about 7-8’ long and vary between 4+”s- 8”s in width. It’s also about 2 1/2”s thick.
As the boards get beaten on they eventually fail and after a while they must be replaced. But just because the last couple feet are split doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of use in the rest. I have about 6 or 7 of these and will keep collecting them as they become available. I plan on running them through the planer and turning them into an antique style dining table. If I could get a lot more I’d be tempted to even make counter tops from it. This stuff is that(!) hard. We’ll see where that goes when the time comes.
I was able to get about half of what I’ve already selected as useful loaded into Walter. It did make him squat some so I’d guess it’s around 1000-1500lbs. He took it like a champ and drove fine all the way home. Looked a lil Beverly Hillbilly but who cares. Not me!
More to come as this moves along slowly.