Garage Demo Day and Tractor Rides

THE RAVENNA HOUSE This past Saturday we made some serious progress in the backyard.  You will remember that we have big plans for the space, starting with demoing the garage.  Ahem, can a garage really be called a garage if no sane person would park a car there?  Well anyway, the garage came down with a dumpster, a skid-steer and three able-bodied adults.  Or should I say three and a half.  

This is what the garage looked like at the beginning of the day:

If you remember, we have had a shared garage with the neighbor (more on that here).  And there was no way to pull down our half without pulling down their half.  Lucky for us, they were as sick of looking at the rotted-old thing as we were, so down it came.

A closer look at our half of the garage:

We salvaged the siding from the side of the garage, which you may have noticed was missing on the left side of the pic above (behind our very skilled laborer, Wilder).  The garage looks pretty sketchy, right?  Like a murder scene from a horror movie.  Well we did find a rotten axe buried in a wall, so...

We rented a 30 cubic-yard dumpster, which was delivered around 10am on Saturday.  We had the driver put it in the driveway between the houses.  It barely fit...

I had about 60 little heartattacks, worrying that dumpster would hit one of the houses (and I'm pretty sure so did the driver), but he got it there, without so much as a dent.

We also rented a skid-steer - at least that's what Garrett called it.  Dear hubby operated the thing and pulled over the garage while the neighbor and I looked on (Wilder got to watch too with Bunia from his bedroom window).

The biggest part of the job, was getting all that wood into the dumpster.  Garrett used the skid-steer to haul the debris to the dumpster while the neighbor and I made sure his loads weren't too wide to fit in-between the houses (seriously, why didn't they plan for dumpsters and skid-steers back in 1926?!).

It only took us a few hours to fill the dumpster.  It's crazy how much wood was in that old garage!  Around 3pm, the dumpster was hauled to a disposal facility.  There was actually too much waste to fit in the container (yes, more then 30 cubic yards!!!) so we ended up with an extra load in the pickup, but we got 'er done.

Here is the same space less then 10 hours after we started:

There was even a little extra time for a tractor ride with Dada:

And again on Sunday:

Those skid-skeers come disinfected, right?

Now that the garage is gone, we can actually fit a car in its spot.  And that's feels pretty awesome.  With this project wrapped up, we're on to a patio, fence, and creating a little backyard oasis.  But with a busy August on the books, I'm not sure when we'll get to it.  Maybe next month.  Until then, at least I can finally park back there!

xoxo

p.s. check out this amazing townhouses' patio from Vogue via Dust Jacket.

p.p.s. obsessed with this backyard tent.  Consider this part of my summer bucket-list for next year.

p.p.p.s. a whole lot more of my favorite outdoor spaces on Pinterest.