TheHumanAlphabet
4/19/2006, 10:32 AM
Since everyone has been posting about their adventures, here's my tale...
We have a house built in 1968, one of the first homes in our NASA neighborhood. The previous owner fashioned himself to be Bob Vila (trust me, he wasn't). He was just cheap...He used to work as a construction engineer (supervised project take offs or turnarounds), I think he had 2 finger discounts - i.e., everything in the house has been installed with 4-inch toggle bolts...
Anyway, there was an old (and poorly built) deck in the back yard, used to house a hot tub, I think. Mrs. THA and I are demo-ing the thing and we get to taking off the boards and looky here... in the middle was this large concrete slab. After laughing a while, the Mrs, and I get back at it...Next, there is conduit all over the other side, I trace it inside to the junction box in the garage, but for my life, I can't tell that it is actually hooked up and all the lights seem to be powered from the main breaker on the house? Well, better bring in an electrician to check that out.
Now we have the whole thing dismantled except for the posts. I hook up a 4-ton floor jack and try to lift the post out of the ground. Well, I break off the post and after now digging down 2 feet, I still haven't hit concrete bottom in lever out the post. I'll get back to it today, but man, how much concrete do you need to stabilize the durn thing...
Life is good...
We have a house built in 1968, one of the first homes in our NASA neighborhood. The previous owner fashioned himself to be Bob Vila (trust me, he wasn't). He was just cheap...He used to work as a construction engineer (supervised project take offs or turnarounds), I think he had 2 finger discounts - i.e., everything in the house has been installed with 4-inch toggle bolts...
Anyway, there was an old (and poorly built) deck in the back yard, used to house a hot tub, I think. Mrs. THA and I are demo-ing the thing and we get to taking off the boards and looky here... in the middle was this large concrete slab. After laughing a while, the Mrs, and I get back at it...Next, there is conduit all over the other side, I trace it inside to the junction box in the garage, but for my life, I can't tell that it is actually hooked up and all the lights seem to be powered from the main breaker on the house? Well, better bring in an electrician to check that out.
Now we have the whole thing dismantled except for the posts. I hook up a 4-ton floor jack and try to lift the post out of the ground. Well, I break off the post and after now digging down 2 feet, I still haven't hit concrete bottom in lever out the post. I'll get back to it today, but man, how much concrete do you need to stabilize the durn thing...
Life is good...