Crazy Construction Materials

kcflhrc · Jun 3, 2014

We moved to our place last September. A 2500 sq. ft. 2 story all brick home on 10 acres built in 1970. I have never owned a house this old. It seems every time I turn around there is some hodgepodge mess to straighten out. Whether it's electrical, flooring, siding, the list goes on and on. Thankfully I'm pretty handy, so my wife says. Seems I start one project and it turns into 2 or 3 projects because someone didn't do it right the first time. I put on a new front door and storm door on the house, really looks nice. So I decide I'll move the old storm door to my 2 car detached garage/workshop. So I get it all installed and it will only open about 2 feet because the concrete in front of the door is slanted. So I decide I will tear out the concrete and redo it. I start tearing this stuff out and there is no rhyme or reason to the thickness. Goes from about 4 inches thick to 1 inch thick or so. All along the edge I see something is holding the concrete together, should be reed bar, but oh no. It's about 8' of log chain in the concrete. So I get that all torn out. Then I find a piece of copper line put in the concrete with what looks like a gas valve on it, once again, just thrown in there for concrete support. This place never ceases to amaze me.

8N Ren · Jun 3, 2014

Lol reminds me of my buddy's shop pad, he found an old bike sans peddles and handle bars, tossed it in.

RDrancher · Jun 3, 2014

In my former life I was a concrete and masonry contractor in SoCal. In those 30 or so years, I saw all kinds of odd stuff. One of the funniest though was while removing a stone wall during renovation of a restaurant on Sunset Blvd. The stone is called Palo Verde and it's quite heavy for it's size. This wall was built out of 12"-18" pieces about 6" thick with a good amount of mortar in between. When the masons were building the wall back in the fifties, they used steel beer cans to separate and support the stone before mortaring it in. It was a sizable wall and there were a lot of beer cans!

We stacked the stone on pallets and I sold it for a pretty good chunk of cash to a swimming pool contractor. There wasn't very much thick Palo Verde left to be had, and he could charge a pretty penny for it to be used for coping.

SPIKER · Jun 3, 2014

lol, ya lots of stuff gets tossed in, the place I have is pretty bad, this guy rescued old skids and used those boards to build sheds and cabin from! If hew could nail 6 boards together to make a 8' long one that is what he did!

Ya he was a scrounger extraordinaire I guess as LOTS of re-purposed items can be found built into stuff here & there. I guess I'm a bit guilty of it too as he has stored maybe half dozen Hog Fence panels, those became rebar in my shed floor when it was poured! lol Feel sorry for anyone wanting to break that floor up. There is chain link fence in there with the hog fence and some old refrigerator shelves. It was going to go into the scrap pile to head to be recycled but when the 20x16 shed needed some crete it was made use of... about 90% of it us on the bottom but with fiber in the cement and 4~4.5" thick it shouldn't crack enough to ever move. (out building)

I still have 3 or 4 big piles of garbage on the 22 acres, old truck parts, glass, beer bottles you name it has been tossed about. He gutted old trailer homes for scrap burnt or tossed onto the ground anything he could make a buck from or reuse somewhere else. My creek crossing is made from the frame of a trailer home & has lasted pretty good (in process of replacing that now.)

Mark

Gem99ultra · Jun 3, 2014

We've ran into the same kind of thing here with our place in our 3 years of living here. There are a million stories from old timers about who lived here and what the place looked like 60 years ago. It turns out that the center of the house was once a hunting cabin. That was moved up the hill to it's current location, and 5 separate additions have been made.

And talk about hiding trash? We have about 12+ acres; we've found pile after pile of pure trash that had been stashed in the woods. Seems that must've been the norm back in the old days - just hide your trash instead of disposing of it. We've almost gotten it all cleaned out - as far as what we've found. But who knows - there surely will be some new discoveries in the future :-(

We did have the opportunity to buy the place next door - a horrid excuse for a house and 5 acres of junk piles. But we decided that it would cost a minimum of $50K just to clear out the junk piles. The house would have had to be bull-dozed - it was beyond economical repair.

The cost for improper trash disposal never actually goes away - it's just deferred to the next buyer, or one that won't tolerate the filth.

oosik · Jun 4, 2014

Talk about strange. I live on what is left of an original 360 acre homestead. Near the old homestead buildings I found the largest stash of farm phone batteries. I started moving it and then found that it was so very much bigger than my wheelbarrow. It ended up being four full FEL bucket loads. Seems the old folks liked listening to their radio and at the time there was no power out here. Lord knows why they saved the old used up batteries. I can remember, as a kid, our phone had two of these old dry cells - about 3" in diameter and 8" to 10" tall.

8N Ren · Jun 4, 2014

I struck it lucky, I found an old steel drum with lid that was a bear bait at one time. And about 2 acres of bush, my place was virgin land. I used that barrel for trash burning till it totally rusted out. I would have gone nuts it the land was filled up with garbage.