The demolition

 We hadn't planned to demo the garage ourselves.  We always thought that we would have our contactor take care of it. 

The day after the fire investigation, we started getting calls from a salvage company about picking up the remains of our trucks.  It was Friday and they wanted them the following Monday.  I didn't think it was a big deal, I thought  they would just hook them to a winch and drag them out - not worrying about the roof that was resting on them.

 

It turns out this was not the case.  The salvage company was not equipped to remove any debris.  They had to be completely free of debris in order to remove them.

This put us in a tough spot - how do we get all of that out of there in just a few short days???

With sheer pissed off determinatin, beer, and a few good friends! 

Chad and Jodi quickly volunteered to come down on Saturday and help us get stuff out of there.  I had a roll-off dumpster dropped off on Friday afternoon.  On Saturday, we put on old clothes, bought a couple cases of beer, left the kids to their own devices in the house (four kids ages 5,3 and 2....what could possibly go wrong????) and we got to work!

We few tools - a couple of shovels, a bunch of homer buckets, a few hammers and an ax.  We went all Amish on the what remained of our garage!

Our initial plan was just to get the roof off the trucks and clean up the debris that had fallen in to our neighbor's yard.  That was it.  The roof proved very difficult to remove and break up - so we just started tearing in to things.  Before we knew it, we had taken down a wall - and then the supports that had been put in after the fire - and we hauled stuff out of the garage - we took pictures and wrote down items that we had forgotten to list. 

The work was hard, back breaking and emotional.  But it was therapeutic work too.  We looked for missing belongings, confirmed that some things were indeed in there and lost, and spent a few minutes just looking at our old trucks and the piles of debris that were inside them.  We were able to take out some aggression by swinging sledge hammers, axes and even saws at the debris.  Not only was it a day of work for us, but it was the first giant step in moving on.

The kids did pretty well - they mostly entertained themselves and we only had to holler at them a little bit!  Our nieghbor girl, Julia, came over to watch them for a few hours too - and that helped a lot!!  Madison became our official beer runner.  It wasn't long before she was hollering "Mom, that case that you just bought is almost empty - you guys are drinking it all!!!!!"  We all had to laugh.  We were working hard and nothing goes better with hard work than an ice cold beer!

As the day wore on, we were making real progress.  By dinner time, we had removed everything with the exception of one wall and the two trucks.  The roll off was full with an extimated TEN TONS of debris and we still had a few piles of stuff to throw out.  We were exhausted. 

While we showered up, had dinner, and relaxed a bit on the deck - we marvelled at how much we had accopmlished that day.  We had demo'd far more than we expected to get done.  We felt good about having achieved so much - but we felt even better that we were taking our recovery in to our own hands.

A few days later, Mike's parents came over to help us with that last wall and to load up the last few piles of stuff into a new rolloff dumpster.