Pickup, 41 Claire

Since we moved into the House of Bich at the end of July 2010, we have gotten rid of an extraordinary amount of stuff with the help of:

-- Two free township bulk pickups (one in May, one in October)
-- One appointment for a township pickup, $30
-- Two appointments with 1-800-GOT JUNK?, somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 total (this included the removal of an old refrigerator and a "work bench")
-- Rich and Leeza's trip to the township dump

Those include nearly 80 years of accumulated crap in the basement, the carpet we ripped out before we had the wood floors restored, everything we took out of one of the crawl spaces, stuff from the shed, detritus from the walk-in closet upstairs, crap we've accumulated over the years, boxes from stuff we've ("we"=Brooke) bought ...

It's been a lot.

This morning, the township picked up the old sink we destroyed with a sledgehammer, a table from my parents' old kitchen that was nearly 20 years old and had, unfortunately, come down with a case of post-Irene mold, and a lot of shrubbery that we'd cut down before we redid the lawn.

Everything. They took everything.

I love Woodbridge.

Basement, continued

(Sorry the video is sideways.)

Today, Rich and I got to work on undoing Irene's work in the basement.

While we were at it, I figured I'd go buy a sledgehammer and get rid of the utility sink; the township's second bulk pickup of the year is coming up, so I figured $27 for a sledgehammer was better than the $300 1-800-GOT JUNK estimated. (They did tell me to just get a sledgehammer and a couple of friends, and that it just wasn't worth it for me to pay them to take out the sink.)

Rich: I don't know what's different about a sledgehammer from a hammer, but that sledge tore through the sink in five minutes.

(To me, that can be answered by sheer physics, but it was pretty impressive. And fun.)

After the sledgehammering:

After we took out all the concrete and rotted wood:

The bare-looking spots in the white paint are where I peeled off the Drylok that was pushed up by the water.

And before I forget, this is how it looked after the 1-800-GOT JUNK guys came back in August:

(I really can't recommend all of their guys enough.

And they were cheerfully game for a photo when I told them I blog about the house.)