This stinks….

If you remember our deck demo, we had a pile of old pressure-treated wood of which we needed to dispose. I’m not sure if there is an easy way to do so other than outsource it which would cost us $300-$400. To stay under budget, we decided this was a DIY project.

We do not have a truck and didn’t feel like bothering our friends that had one (Amy & Kurtis – we used your truck to pick up our dining table and didn’t have time for this job), so we rented a U-Haul. Yep. U-Hauls double as dump trucks when you want them to.  As you can see below, Trent, at 9am, is just ecstatic to begin this day and is equally ecstatic I’m documenting his emotions. Can you tell he’s not a morning person?

After picking up the U-Haul, we then had to very carefully load the truck with the wood.  And by wood, I mean pieces of rotten deck with handfuls of rusty nails sticking out of them.

The fun didn’t stop there. Now that our stack of wood was picked up and put into the truck, it was time to dump it.

There’s an entire 250 square foot deck in there!

I had never been to the dump before, and having done this once now, I don’t hope to go back anytime soon. If you’ve never been, it’s actually quite an interesting place. It’s something to experience and check off your list, but once you do, never go back.  Think of when you’re on the beach and you look out beyond the water and there isn’t an end in sight. It’s just like that – only instead of glorious ocean water, it’s less-than-glorious trash – miles and miles of trash.

Emptying the uHaul was actually much harder than loading it. The space in which we had to move was much smaller and  some sort of monster moon-plow (earthmover) would pull up a few feet from you to sweep the trash away like it was matchsticks. Terrifying/Awesome.

Here is the video to show you how close this actually was.

Piece by rusty nailed piece of wood we eventually got the job done and without any injuries.

Total cost breakdown of this job: $150

• Uhaul: $80
• Disposal fee at the dump: $50
• Gas: $20

By doing it ourselves, we saved about $200. #WorthIt.

It’s going down…I’m yelling TIMBER

One of our first big demo projects was taking down the deck. Unfortunately, it seemed to have been another DIY project by the previous owner. The deck wasn’t up to code and parts of it were rotted and unstable – basically the opposite of safe. It had to go.

Trent and I decided we would do the demo on our own to save some money. Plus it looked like fun.

We started by buying “his and hers” sledgehammers from Home Depot because we are super romantic. There are many online videos describing how to demolish a deck, but come on, it seemed pretty simple. Similar to Trent’s tub thumping, we just figured the best idea would be to just smash it up.

As you can tell from this video clip, I was a huge help during the demolition – Trent’s encouraging cheers brought me enough adrenaline to knock down this one already-wobbly piece of wood. You may notice how strong I am.

After I swung my lady-hammer a couple times, I returned to my womanly duty of raking leaves . Trent did the rest of the deck because his ego is fragile and he requires constant validation of his manhood. Below is a picture of the top of the deck post-smash.

The hard hat was probably not necessary but removing some of the supports from under the deck could have caused the whole thing to come down on top of Trent. While hilarious, that would have been ugly. I don’t know that the hard hat would have offered much protection, but the peace of mind was worth it.

Don’t let the pictures fool you. I wasn’t completely useless during this process. I helped move pieces of wood to a stack in the driveway. Mule-work you say? Why yes then, I did mule-work.

Side note: if you are doing this at home, please wear gloves. I’m not sure if we were experiencing a normal amount of rusty nails holding this deck together,  but a rusty nail in the hand would be a miserable end to an otherwise glorious DIY day.We decided to haul off the wood on our own to save money so we tried to neatly stack it. Evidently you can’t just stack up pressure-treated wood and light it on fire any more. Thanks for nothing, Al Gore.

Here is the beginning of our stack – guess which side I started stacking on. If you guess the side that is thrown into a big pile with no known organization, you would be correct.

Presley was obviously a huge help to us during this process. 

And drum roll…… we are finally finished with the demo! Now we can walk out of our kitchen to an untimely demise. Perfect.