This Space for Rent

Let’s not pave it over and put in a parking lot

We have a two car garage, which, thanks to some hamfisted home "improvements" by a previous owner, is never used to store automobiles. We also have, thanks to a previous owner, a chunk of our tiny backyard removed and replaced with a thick slab of concrete. We couldn't actually use this part of the backyard for anything, so it ended up just being a large ugly wasteland that I used as a yard for yard debris and other junk that was on its way out to the dump but wasn't yet a big enough pile to warrant hiring a dumpster.

It wasn't very attractive, particularly in the height of summer when the huge concrete slab soaked up heat, then radiated it out to make those hot summer days even hotter. It certainly didn't make me want to go and spend any time in the backyard, so the backyard suffered (it suffered more when yellowjackets started to colonize the area, and we retreated at a dead run from the summertime swarms of yellow and black stinging monsters.) Eventually we decided it had to go, so for a good part of last year we hunted around for a contractor who would cut the slab up into smaller pieces, but were unable to find one.

Finally, two weeks ago, I snapped and grabbed mallets, cold chisels, and shovels and started to break the stupid thing up in the traditional old fashioned way (by undercutting the slab, then hurling 40-pound boulders at the overhang.) It's not a particularly fast way to remove concrete, but it's a wonderful way to work out my frustrations with my rapidly deteriorating work environment.

In two weeks, the bears and I have managed to remove about 9 square yards of concrete (which is now piled up in a 12 foot long stone wall), dig out around a cubic yard of topsoil which has washed down from the property behind us (a narrow walkway behind a commercial building,) mix that topsoil with leafmold from a wormpile (a wormpile that was heaped on the now-removed chunk of concrete), and dump the resulting soil into the excavation left after removing the concrete slabs.

It's, even if we go out and buy a palletload of sod, cheaper than hiring someone else to do the work, and it's intensely gratifying to be able to do the work myself. And when I get a little bit farther into this, I'll feel more confident that I can start upgrading the garage without making everyone else in the family think I'm merely committing a particularly spectacular hacker's suicide.