The Incessant Dust

In preparation for putting an addition on my house, I started to move everything out of my basement to the first floor.

Part of my plan is to finish the basement, and have a laundry room and a nice workbench. Just about every bit of home improvement I have done results in a tremendous amount of dust, most of which ends up in the basement. Vaccum all you want, in a few more weeks everything will be covered in dust. It will be nice to get the walls and ceiling closed in.

I did also finally get rid of some relics in the basement that came with the house and I was never motivated enough to remove before. Two make-shift shelves (made with unfinished dimensional lumber, probably from the original walls of the house) were constructed down there. The only way to get them out was to dismantle them. There was also a very old, very broken dresser with a mirror that I proceeded to throw out my backyeard into my concrete back yard (Which, incidentally, is already occupied by a growing mountain of trash and tons of clippings from viens that grew rampant while I was deployed).

So now I have a very large mountain of trash in my backyard, which is bad for three reasons:

1) I am not home during the day, and a big pile of trash invited trash-pickers to come root, who may also take things that are not trash.

2) Some people see piles of trash as an opportunity to get rid of their own trash, especially if nobody is around to see them.

3) Neighbors don’t like big piles of trash… it looks, well, trashy.

The burning question now is whether or not to hire a general contractor to do the major construction work, or to hire some workers myself to get it done. The former is eternally simpler, but will cost a lot more money. The latter leaves me exposed to a lot of setbacks, liabilities, etc, but it more budget friendly.

I can remember coming home from Kuwait with the thought in my head that I’d be done my addition by Christmas. That didn’t happen, and now, with 4 months to plan, it may not even be underway before Christmas. (Sigh)