What you would be hearing, if you could be here with me live, is the gleeful sound of children who were offered a substantial (to them) sum of money to do a menial (to me) but necessary chore. It's amazing how the salve of cold, hard cash applied across a number of children eases the pain of hard labor.
What they are doing is removing many hundreds of nails from a big pile of salvaged oak floor boards. I had put a wanted ad on craigslist a while back looking for some old strip oak flooring to match the existing floors in our house, to put in the new addition. Amazingly, a guy contacted me who was ripping out some of the exact stuff I was looking for. We were more than happy to take it off his hands. The huge pile of nail-y wood has been taking up precious space in the garage for a few months now, while Matt and I scratched our heads over what would be the most effective way of pulling out all those nails to get the boards ready to be re-installed in our house. It turns out all we had to do was dangle a few twenty dollar bills in front of the children. They had the whole job done in a few hours!
We are now employing the same strategy to wipe out a whole bunch more big jobs around the homestead. No sooner had the children dropped their hammers, I sent them out to the back yard (aka "The Becker Mudflats") to start picking rocks out of the rough-graded muck from last fall's construction. We have a pretty bad track record when it comes to growing grass. As it stands right now, we have almost
no grass at all in the back, so we're gonna have to do something. Green spray paint is starting to sound like a reasonable idea. We'll keep you posted, because there's nothing more exciting than reading about growing grass except for maybe actually watching grass grow.
David, as always, is enjoying watching other people work. He's got a great crawl-up view of the back yard from the sliding glass door.
What you would be hearing, if you could be here with me live, is the gleeful sound of children who were offered a substantial (to them) sum of money to do a menial (to me) but necessary chore. It's amazing how the salve of cold, hard cash applied across a number of children eases the pain of hard labor.
What they are doing is removing many hundreds of nails from a big pile of salvaged oak floor boards. I had put a wanted ad on craigslist a while back looking for some old strip oak flooring to match the existing floors in our house, to put in the new addition. Amazingly, a guy contacted me who was ripping out some of the exact stuff I was looking for. We were more than happy to take it off his hands. The huge pile of nail-y wood has been taking up precious space in the garage for a few months now, while Matt and I scratched our heads over what would be the most effective way of pulling out all those nails to get the boards ready to be re-installed in our house. It turns out all we had to do was dangle a few twenty dollar bills in front of the children. They had the whole job done in a few hours!
We are now employing the same strategy to wipe out a whole bunch more big jobs around the homestead. No sooner had the children dropped their hammers, I sent them out to the back yard (aka "The Becker Mudflats") to start picking rocks out of the rough-graded muck from last fall's construction. We have a pretty bad track record when it comes to growing grass. As it stands right now, we have almost no grass at all in the back, so we're gonna have to do something. Green spray paint is starting to sound like a reasonable idea. We'll keep you posted, because there's nothing more exciting than reading about growing grass except for maybe actually watching grass grow.
David, as always, is enjoying watching other people work. He's got a great crawl-up view of the back yard from the sliding glass door.
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