About a year ago my dad sold his house in the Hollywood Hills (to Barry Zito of the Oakland A's if you really wanna know). He downsized from a 5000 square foot house to a smart 1200 square foot ocean-front apartment in Santa Monica.
While his old house seemed sort of sparsely furnished, when he attempted to move the contents to his new place--roughly 1/5 the size of his old place, he discovered (duhhhhhhhhhh) that he just simply couldn't fit it all. Pretty fucking madcap.
So, he decided to use our house as a storage facility. Because we have a fairly large home, but we have is a really really big back driveway and garage.
Movers brought load upon load of stuff here. While we scored with a few things: a new dining room table and chairs (that I actually wanted), and some nice suede chairs for the living room (ok, they're light brown and in hindsight not a good mix with large dogs and small children), most of the stuff he sent over here was utter and total crap.
So his crap has been sitting in our back driveway (and garage) for about a year. Add to his crap our crap and you've got a huge pile of crap taking up the entire back drive. It made me cranky every time I went out there. Chuck was not any happier about it. My dad was completely oblivious to it.
A few months ago I decided it was well past time to get rid of it all.
I made some calls and inquired into getting a dumpster delivered. I'm here to tell you, it's not as cheap as you might think to get what amounts to a huge garbage can delivered to your house. Then there's the issue of getting all the crap into said dumpster. You pay big bucks for the dumpster, and go down to the corner by the local rental yard and hire some day laborers to fill it for you (more money out) and you schlep and supervise and fight with your husband and it.
Hours of hard labor and marital discord. Now there's a weekend to look forward to.
Or you go another way: You make some phone calls, have some people come over and look at your pile of crap and they tell you the pile of money it's going to cost you to have them do it.
As you might have guessed, I opted for the latter.
So at 11:00 this morning Ru from Small Time Hauling arrived at our home. He had a huge truck, two day laborers (no doubt culled from legions of men hanging out in front of the local rental yard), and I stood outside and smoked and supervised the work.
Not only did they load up and haul away all the crap that needed to go, but when they were done loading, they swept up the leaves and whatnot and moved the crap I wanted to keep into the places where I wanted it to be.
It was a beautiful thing.
I have to go now and stand in my back driveway and admire the craplessness of it all.
Posted by beth at March 20, 2004 01:20 PMSo when does dad call and look for some of the crap he has been "saving" at your place?
;^)