I will soon be heading out to continue working on the new garden bed, but first I wanted to share the progress my daughters did yesterday, while I was away.
This is turning out to be a pretty big job! You can see the pile of roots that they added to. They also set some things aside, because they knew I would want to check them out!
The group of thick roots are all from a single root. While the tree whose stump it came from has been dead for a long time, and the roots were rotting enough to break apart, it still look them quite a bit of effort to get it out. Especially with having to make do with what tools they could find.
That really long root is a cherry root that took both of them to yank out of the ground. I would not be surprised to find more like this as we continue to clear the area.
Also…
This was found buried near a different stump. Where it was found is where there was a makeshift pallet fence, a roll of old carpet, and a bunch of other junk. It was deep enough in the soil that I missed it entirely last year, even as I was digging around to get out as many pieces of rotten pallet wood as I could find.
I hope to get this area done quickly, so we can plant things that don’t have to wait until after last frost, but with how many roots we’ve been finding so far, I am thinking it won’t be that quick at all! :-D
While doing my morning rounds, I decided to go into a couple of the sheds and look around.
The first one is among those that is falling apart and really needs to be torn down. There are many holes in the roof, so the dirt floor is quite wet and muddy inside.
We would need to go through its contents and figure out what to do with them. We can’t tear it down yet, because that will leave a gap in the fence into the hay yard, and the renter’s cows go into there. I want to change where the fence is, eventually, so I don’t want to put in new fence. It will stay there for probably a few more years. If it doesn’t collapse, first.
I’ve been in here several times, but didn’t really look closely at the pile of stuff in the corner. I might have noticed this before, but it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time. I’ve tried to outline it and make it stand out better, so you can see it, too.
This is a small plow. I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be pulled with a horse.
When my dad bought the property, he upgraded to tractors, but a horse and her foal came with the farm. No horse drawn plow has been used here in something like 50-60 years.
This is definitely a keeper.
There’s also an object near it; you can see the metal wheel and a gear near the front of the plow. I can’t see it well enough to even guess what it is. It should be interesting when we finally get to cleaning up that corner, and finally see all of it.
I next went into the side shed of the garage and moved the snow blowers to the back and lawn mowers to the front. There is a shelf against the back wall that seems to be tipping more and more. Thankfully, there is lots of stuff in front of it, so it can’t actually fall over.
While looking in it, I noticed this box.
Cool! That would be so awesome, if there were an actual angle grinder in the angle grinder box.
Of course, I know by now that the likelihood of that is very low.
Even so, this has got to be top of the list of weird things we’ve been finding.
Yes. Those are teeth.
Human teeth.
I’m pretty sure they are real teeth. You can see that one molar has cavity holes in it.
Judging from the adhesive on many of the plastic pieces, it looks like quite a few have fallen off. The bottom of this box is likely covered with loose teeth.
Now, I can probably imagine how these were acquired. My late brother did demolitions, and this was one of his workshops here at the farm. When tearing down buildings, he often found unusual things, and was able to bring home some things that would otherwise have ended up in the landfill. Many were quite usable. For example, he tore down old restaurants, and we still have commercial quality table cloths he’d found, and my favourite cutlery is from one of those demos. It’s amazing what gets left behind in places. He likely was doing a demolition of a place that once had a denturist or something in it.
However they were found, the questions remain: why keep them? Why leave them in this shed? What was the plan for these?
As we find keep finding odd things, I now keep them in mind for some future found object art pieces I plan to make and set up around the property.
These teeth will likely have a prominent part in this! :-D
Okay, not completely done, because there are still weird things all over the place, but that can be taken care of slowly over time, even after we’ve set up for cats. So, done enough!
I decided to make use of the remaining shelves of the plastic shelving units I got for the old part basement, with its too low ceiling.
For where I wanted to put them, I had to make an even bigger mess.
It kinda looks like the room exploded. :-/ But, it had to be done!
Here is the final result for the shelves and counters against the old basement wall.
The plastic shelf on the yellow counter will help brace the rigid insulation that’s blocking the old window. There is a heat duct on the other side. It doesn’t even reach into the window, but just has an opening facing it, but there’s enough air pressure to push against the sheet of insulation. I’ve pokes holes in it to let more air through, but having the shelf against it will ensure it can’t be pushed off.
The counter top of the yellow shelf is sagging, and I needed to get the back legs of the plastic shelf as far back as I could, so I ended up laying some boards I salvaged from around the basement, leveled with pieces of floor tiles (those old floor tiles are coming in incredibly handy!)
In the process of working in this area, I checked out the cupboard under the other shelf. I’d only looked at the other half while working here before, and wanted to see if there were more things we needed to haul out.
I found three more motors.
Why are there so many motors??? Counting the ones already moved to the barn, we’ve found more than a dozen motors, scattered about!
At this point, I think we’re just going to leave them in the basement for now, instead of hauling them up the stairs and to the barn. It’s not like the cats can really do anything to them, and they can be hauled out later in the year.
That was just one area that I didn’t expect to have to go so far into. I also cleared out the area were we’d put the van’s original door. There was a whole bunch of stuff behind the old radio, and a sheet of plywood leaning against the old basement wall with more stuff behind it, that was definitely not cat friendly.
Here you can see the part of the old basement wall that had been underground when the concrete was poured. Unfortunately, it makes for a very uneven wall, which in turn makes for gaps we’re going to have to find some way to fill.
After moving out the stuff behind the plywood, I shoved the plywood back, pushing it further behind the lilac shelf, to block off the gap behind it. There is still a gap at the top we’ll have to figure out how to cover. The old radio, meanwhile, is now right up against the plywood, I put some cardboard on it to protect the top, and tiles under the base. The car door is back, and I’ve shoved the twin sized bed frame I’d been using for some time after my husband had to start using a hospital bed.
In the process of doing all this, I found stuff, of course.
Yes!!!! I found some plumb line!
It’s not the one I remember helping my dad use, but I’m happy to have found any at all. It will be quite useful in the future, I’m sure. I made sure to tuck it into a spot that was in the open, so I can find it easily in the future.
This next find was a surprise.
I haven’t seen this since I was … probably a pre-teen! I forget which of my brother’s made it. I think it was a school project. It’s modeled on a plaster cast version still sitting in the old kitchen.
It’s a keeper!
I also moved stuff into the unfinished bar area.
It’s got a bunch of fragile things that need to be protected from the cats, substances in various bottles, jugs and cans that the cats need to be protected from, and some of the stuff we found that we want to restore at some point. All we have to do now is rig up a door to keep the cats out.
Not a lot changed in this corner; I cleaned that shelf, but don’t really have anything to put in it, now that we’ve cleared the junk out. The chairs had been stored against the wall closer to the stairs, and I moved them here to open up the space there, and so they can be used. Some things, like the remaining piece of rigid insulation, will be moved out of there, as we do the last few things before letting the cats in.
More chairs were moved around that table, and the remaining shelf from the old basement got moved in to where I’d found another sheet of plywood. There are still gaps, because of the uneven wall, that need to be filled by the opening between the basements. We now need to also rig up a door of some kind between the old and new basements.
With the very odd shape of the opening, this is not going to be easy.
After this, we have to start hauling stuff out for either barn or junk piles. Once that’s out, the area just needs a quick clean up, and a filling of old mouse holes in the shelves under the stairs, and the root cellar. Then I can take our Christmas decorations out of the root cellar and move them back into this area.
We are so close to being done! But I am so dreading hauling the stuff out. Some of it is very heavy, and others just difficult and potentially dangerous to carry up the stairs. The girls and I will have to assembly line it.
But not quite yet. They’ve been working hard cleaning on the main floor, and we all need a break right now!
The girls and I were able to get quite a lot of progress in the new part basement yesterday, and I was able to get into a particular area of concern today.
Here is our progress from yesterday.
The biggest progress isn’t even visible. We were able to get all the cans of paint and other… stuff… out from some cupboards. Some of them were leaking. I got another 2 wheelbarrow loads of cans of paint, stains, and mystery tines to the barn.
We found another 6 motors of varying sizes and condition to move to the barn. There’s an unopened back of grout compound that will need to be thrown away. Moisture got to it, and it’s a brick now. We found a snowmobile suit shoved into a garbage can. Now that I think about it, judging from the size, it may have belonged to my late brother. If it did, it may have been there for more than 10 years! These things are rather expensive, and it seems a shame to throw it away, but I just don’t see how it could be safe to use after being in the basement for even just a couple of years. Dust, mold mildew… still, we just hung it up on the wall for now.
Stuff that’s going to the barn are being set by the stairs for now, as well as a growing collection of garbage bags, with stuff for the junk pile or burn barrel in the shopping cart, and broken/damaged glass in a box, so we can haul it all out at once. That is always a challenge, since we need one person to lug stuff up the stairs, one person at the doors to grab stuff and stick it outside, and one person with a spray bottle on cat duty! LOL I look forward to not having to worry about keeping the cats out of this basement anymore!
Of course, we found all sorts of things in the process of cleaning, including…
…a collection of hammers, among other tools. I also moved the hand saw collection to the other basement, to join the ax collection. :-D
Today, I focused on the “bar” my late brother had started to build when he was still in his teens, but never finished. It had been mostly cleared out yesterday, but there were still a few things to take out so I could clean the area.
Some cow bells. Because, of course. Another shoe form.
A very old racking cane and siphon hose. We’d earlier found a box with wine making chemicals and supplies, all of which had to be thrown out.
I have no idea why there are so many wine making supplies around here. My parents didn’t use them, and the only members of my family that make their own wine, do it in their own homes.
An old, beat up suitcase full of light fixtures and electrical bits and pieces. Because where else would you put what is likely broken, unusable bits and pieces?
This next case makes me quite sad.
What the labels don’t tell you is that this is a portable screen printing kit.
On the right is where ink would be spread. The roller would be loaded with in there, then rolled over the screen on the other side, which would have the design on it.
Under the screen is the surface that would hold the paper being printed.
You can see how torn the screen it – and the tape that was put around it.
This thing was in pristine condition when we acquired it. It was one of many things that were left behind in the old house my parents got – I believe for the cost of moving it – and moved into the yard, where it is now being used for storage. I made the mistake of taking this case, and a box full of wrapped up printing blocks, to the Industrial Arts teacher in high school. He is the one that put the tape around the screen, and “cleaned” it with whatever solvents they had in the class (there was an old style block printer that we used to make “business cards” as a class assignment). As for the printing blocks, they were covered in grease that he cleaned up, then wrapped them in paper. Well, it turned out that grease was protecting the surface of those blocks, and they have since degraded horribly. I doubt they can be restored. I doubt this screen print kit can be restored fully, either. :-(
Another item I had to clear out turned out to be a surprise. I knew it was there, but…
… what I didn’t expect that 1) it hadn’t been cleaned since it was last used and 2) that it would still be full.
That’s right. When I tried to move it, I found it unexpectedly heavy. Then it started to slosh.
*shudder*
I don’t know how many years this has been sitting here.
I’m really hoping the liquid is just water or something, to serve as weight to keep is steady, because that’s just a hole on the bottom. It doesn’t lead to a basin or reservoir.
At least it is still sealed shut. There’s no smell or leakage.
We’ve found some pretty icky stuff since we moved in and started cleaning up. The worst so far had been old cat poop in a corner of what was my mother’s bedroom, and cat litter on the floor under a dresser. My dad hadn’t had a cat indoors for years before he went into the nursing home. The girls had also found a mouse skeleton behind a shelf upstairs. I think a used, dirty portable toilet filled with liquid now joins the list of most horrifying things we’ve found in the house since moving in.
*shudder*
There were many other things found as well, including glass lamp shades – one still in the box it was bought in – more paint cans and various other odd bits and pieces.
This is what the bar looked like, after I emptied it.
Yes, I was wearing a mask and gloves!
This was the main area of concern.
There is water damage. The wall the plywood is covering is the wall to the old part basement, so this would be from when it had flooded in the past, soaking through to this side. This is also one of the few areas where we found mouse feces.
Which meant extra care needed to be taken to clean up this area. Brushing and sweeping, vacuuming and finally a cleaning with bleach.
Here is how it looked when I stopped.
I now have a fan set up to dry it.
We have a moldicide spray that we’ll use on that plywood wall, too.
Once it’s all dry, we’ll use this to store things we want to protect from the cats, but don’t want to store in the old part basement. We’ll be making a “door” across the front, and I hope to pick up some wire mesh tomorrow, that we can use to cover the counter area to keep the cats out.
If all goes well, we will finish this tomorrow, set up some “nesting boxes” and a litter box, then bring in Butterscotch and Beep Beep.
I saw Butterscotch while I was doing my rounds this morning. She even allowed me to pick her up and carry her over the muddy areas. She is still pregnant, so we might be able to get this done in time, after all!
Just a little bit closer to being done!
The Re-Farmer
addendum: The girls and I talked about the portable toilet, and the two things behind the lid; one of which is an opening, the other looks like it can be squeezed down on. We thought it might actually be a flusher, so I went down to check the status of the floor, and stopped to read the label on that portable toilet. Sure enough, this is a flushing toilet top. It’s missing a part; there is supposed to be a chamber under it.
Which would actually have come in handy when our septic backed up. More comfortable than a honey pot!
If only it had been cleaned and emptied after its last use…
My goal for today was to start getting things out of the basement and into the barn or junk pile, as appropriate. My daughters were doing a whole bunch of baking, but we were able to coordinate a time when we could work together on that.
I didn’t get as much done in the basement as I wanted, but there was still a lot of progress.
The first thing to do was shovel a path to the barn and get one of the doors clear enough to open.
There were a couple of problems. The first was that, having worked my way to the barn door, my hip suddenly did it’s thing. From one step to the next, I became unable to put any weight on my right leg, due to pain and instability.
I was, however, able to work on my left leg, so as long as I could just pivot around, I could finish clearing the barn door, moving my right leg around just enough to try and work out whatever was causing the pain in my hip joint. By the time I did, my hip was back to normal, and I could deal with the second problem.
There was a ridge of ice right at the door. The doors sag in the middle, and it was just high enough to prevent the door from opening. The plastic snow shovel couldn’t clear it away, but a steel shovel could chip away enough for the door to finally open.
These doors are feeling very fragile.
Once inside, I had to figure out where I could clear out a space to put things.
My goodness, what a terrible picture. My hands must have been shaking like crazy, after the shoveling! Normally, I take multiple photos, just in case, but not today. Ah, well.
So I’m in the middle of the barn at this point. The old cattle stalls in the front half were all full of things, but further back were some that might be workable. Of course, the hall in the middle needed to be cleared, too.
There was also the lean to on the side of the barn, which has more space, but…
When a metal roof was put on the barn (right on top of the rotting original roof), the lean to was skipped. As you can see, there is a lot of water in there. Water from the melting snow is dripping straight through a number of areas.
There was a stall that I could at least partially clear. In the process, I found…
… old trusses that are rotting where they touch the concrete. (That’s my gloved finger messing with the photo, there. LOL)
Those metal screens in the back are interesting, though. I might find a use for them.
This grabber was hanging at one end. This is not something I remember from when I was growing up here. I have no idea where it came from. Looking at the size of the handle, this is meant for two people to use. One of these days, I’d love to restore it.
After clearing some space, I also cleared away some stuff that was in the gutter in front of the old stall. Some pieces of wood had managed to fall under the lid of the cistern, so I opened it up to get them out.
I didn’t bother getting the rest of the junk out. I do wonder why these are hear. They couldn’t have fallen in with the lid in place.
This, btw, is a urine drain. When the cows did their business, most went into the gutters, and the urine would flow into the pair of cisterns on either side of the hallway. Once they were full, we just emptied them with a bucket.
This is how things looks after clearing things out.
I could now get through the hall to access the space I’d cleared.
There is a whole lot of stuff all over the barn. Including lots and lots of windows.
Like this one, which looks like something we might be able to use in a future cordwood practice building. After the outhouse, which will have strategically placed bottle bricks instead of windows, we’re thinking of making a garden shed, which will have windows.
With that in mind, I went looking at some of the other stuff lying about.
I rather like this steel, exterior door. If it’s not too water damaged, I think it would be fantastic for our outdoor bathroom. There aren’t keys, of course, so the deadbolt and probably the door knob would need to be replace. Likely the hinges as well. It looks like there’s only half hinges on there right now. :-D
There are also these huge pieces of window glass. Too big for any project we’re thinking of now, but perhaps usable for something else.
I also checked out a shed near the barn. I’ve actually been poking about a few places, as the snow melts enough for me to be able to access them, looking for the drawknife I know I saw, some time ago. I can’t remember where, though! So far, I have not been able to find it. :-( I was hoping to get it sharpened for use as we debark wood for the cordwood building.
The shed has more windows, including one that looks like it would work well in the deep walls of a cordwood building.
Why are there so many windows all over the place? Many of them are quite old, made before the more energy efficient double and triple pane windows were invented.
It may not look like much, but this aluminum double sink is still quite sturdy. I am thinking of cleaning it up and bringing it into the old basement, to go under the set of taps where the washing machine used to be.
Ah, there’s the table saw! I was hoping it wasn’t one of the things that grew legs and walked away while this place was empty.
Which makes me think it might now be in working order.
If it is, I’m going to be very happy! It will come in very handy for future projects.
I kinda sorta found a second one.
I spotted a blade in between the stacks of flooring. It seems to be a table saw, without it’s table!
Speaking of tables…
There’s a round table top, minus its legs (which might be lying about somewhere else, for all I know), next to yet another stack of windows.
I wonder if that big blower on the counter works? It looks like a larger version of what we have in the old basement.
They’re hard to see, but there are stacks of glass blocks under the counter. I was seeing some at the salvage yard website I found, and at salvage prices, blocks of this size were selling for $8 each. There’s probably about 30 or 40 of them under there.
At one end of the shed are more doors. That wooden door with the big glass window is probably an exterior door. The lock on it would be for a skeleton key. They certainly don’t make doors like this anymore – with reason!
Then there’s a sections of a fence, that was clearly cut apart with a saw. :-/ And more windows. Because there are windows, everywhere!
Hopefully, we’ll be able to find most of the materials we need to build our first cordwood practice building in all of this!
Then there was this thing.
I have no clue what this thing is. If anyone knows, please leave a note in the comments, because I would love to find out!
I also found these.
Just… tucked away, under a shelf.
I really don’t think these go back to when my dad worked in a shoe factory. They are newer than that.
So many things… so few explanations! :-D
With the space cleared in the barn, it was time to get stuff out of the basement.
Which… didn’t go as well as I had hoped. My hip did its thing again, part way through, and we ended up stopping sooner than I’d hoped.
That shopping cart has been coming in very handy, including as an impromptu walker!
We did get a decent amount out, though.
At this point, we just needed to get the stuff out of the house, so my daughter put the stuff in organized piles. Glass and regular garbage in one area, the water damaged shelf, riddled with nails, for burning, hazardous materials, including mystery liquids, and stuff to go to the barn for storage, or the junk pile.
Once my hip was working again, the girls went back to baking and I got the bigger wheel barrow and started hauling things away.
I also grabbed a cane from our collection to keep handy, just in case! :-D
Then, since I was hauling things into the barn anyhow, I cleared a few things from the garage, too.
It’s still a disaster, but I was able to clear out more batteries, paint cans, and some jugs and 5 gallon pails of mystery liquid.
I discovered that this wheelbarrow can handle only 2 batteries at a time. Those things are heavy!!
Gosh, there is a lot of junk to sift through in there. :-( Somehow, we have to separate out the junk from the stuff worth keeping. I see some sort of little compressor under there.
After many trips back and forth to the barn (I had my phone in my pocket, and walked far enough to hatch 3 Pokemon Go eggs! That would make it at least 2 kms of walking, probably more), this is the result.
I’ve got the hazmat mystery liquids and paint in one area, a total of 11 car, truck and possibly tractor batteries (there are at least two more in the side of the garage where we keep the lawn mower, and probably more in the basement) and a couple of old sump pumps. My brother tells me that at least one of them works, as it was used as an emergency pump at some point. There are others that will make their way in here, too. I’m hoping to get the old door from the van into the barn as well, and there are quite a lot of other things that I’d like to get out, including what appears to be a collection of motors. If we run out of space here, there is another section that can be cleared out for more.
Then, at some point, we’ll take all the old paint cans and mystery liquids to the landfill for proper disposal, and the batteries will be taken to a scrap yard to be sold for their lead, along with the bags of aluminum.
By the time all this was done, it was almost evening. There were still loaves of bread rising, with some in the oven, so no one had been able to start supper.
My husband was a sweetheart and ordered pizza! I didn’t mind the trip into town to pick it up. Since I’ll be going into town again tomorrow, to pick up prescription refills, it gave me the opportunity to park the van in front of the house. That way, I won’t have to walk through the lake of melt water to get to the garage!
Hhhhmmm… That pizza is really hitting the spot! <3
I was able to get a few more hours working on the old basement today.
Honestly, I should probably be using those hours doing housework, but that’s depressing. :-D Cleaning the basement may be really gross at times, but once it’s done, it’ll stay done for a very long time.
It’s a psychological thing. :-D
Today, I finally got to the water damaged shelf.
The containers at the bottom, with odds and ends in them, simply got moved to the other basement, to join the other stuff there we’ll need to sort through and figure out what to do with. That big plant pot will hopefully be big enough to transplant our umbrella tree into. I just have to find a drip tray for it, though the umbrella tree will likely spend the summer outside again, so I’ve got time for that.
Through the shelf, peaking from behind the chimney that used to be hooked up to the old wood burning furnace, is a really big baking pan. Too big to fit in the oven, so I don’t know why it’s here. I later cleaned it up and set it aside. I’ll be using it as a tray for when we start seeds indoors.
Dismantling the shelf was certainly interesting. Just look at the size of those nails! (In case you can’t make them out, they’re about 4 inches long, and those were what held the shelves to the sides.) For part of it, I ended up using a big flat head screwdriver to pry pieces apart. I had thought that some of the boards might be salvageable, but… nope. This will all go to the burn pile.
That shopping cart came in handy. :-D
Yay! It’s done!
That extension cord plugged into the outlet goes up through the floor, and into the master bedroom, along with a TV cable. There’s no longer a TV there, but the extension cord still comes in handy!
When we’re finally able to renovate, this chimney is what I want to have removed and replaced with a dumbwaiter. :-) That will make it so much easier to move things from floor to floor!
With the space opened up, I though I might set up a table here. Some time ago, I’d noticed a sturdy looking wooden table top leaning against the wall just on the other side of the opening to the new part basement. No sign of any legs, though. While I was clearing things in the new basement, I found – along with the hand pump and other things I uncovered – a set of legs that looked like they might belong to this table top.
So I brought them over.
They were, of course, extremely dusty, so I gave all the pieces a good cleaning. This table is clearly home made. I’m thinking it may have been made by my late brother. He did have a wood lathe and could have turned those legs himself.
Unfortunately…
The holes the legs were meant to fit into had crud in them. Only one of them was clear. These two were the worst. I was able to scrape most of the glue and residue out with a utility knife, but that was it for now.
So the legs were definitely made for this table, and the ends would normally have fit into the openings. With all the crud in there, they wouldn’t go all the way in.
I decided to set it up, anyway, in a different area.
I lured my daughter away from some commission work to give me a hand in setting it up on bricks, to protect from any future flooding. (The water on the floor was from the still wet table top and legs.)
I just had to set up my mother’s “thou shalt not steal” sign. Too funny!
Once it was set up, I hammered the table top down, using a piece of scrap wood to protect the surface, to try and get those legs into the openings as much as possible. They barely moved! Which meant that this is a very, very wobbly table.
Just to be on the safe side, because I KNOW I’ll forget and lean on it or something, I made up a warning sign. :-D
After this, I was able to start working on the other side of the basement.
There isn’t a lot that has been added to the space, but it’s big stuff, so it’s filling up fast!
The remains of a wooden chair got pulled apart (the legs were already falling off!) and added to the shopping cart with the rotten shelf pieces. The garden hose we’d used to help clear the access pipe to the septic tank got rolled up into a 5 gallon bucket I’d found, so it’s all nice and neat and tucked away. In one of the pictures, you can see some hoses behind what looks like black pool noodles. Those are old aquarium hoses. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to use them again, since I’ve not been able to find a source to replace a broken hose connector for the filter of our big aquarium. Still, just in case, I cleaned them up, then found another bucket I could roll them up into. I even found a lid to keep the dust off them.
Here is how it looks now. When shifting the broken hot water tank, to move out the box the new one came in, I discovered there was still water in it that had started to drain. So that got moved over the drain trough next to the old hot water tank we replaced shortly after moving here. The next time I work down here, it will be to dismantle at least that one tank, as it’s way too heavy to haul up the stairs as it is. The newer broken tank is pretty light, so it might be easier to take it outside as is. I still want to dismantle it. I would really love to see if I can tell why it broke after only about 2 years.
There is still stuff that needs to be sorted through, but that is for another time. Of course, there are always odd finds. There were so many buckets of various sizes, but only one had a lid on it. Given what I’ve been finding elsewhere, I feared it might have something else for the special disposal pile.
Nope. Just this.
No clue what these are for, but I assume they were cut to size and kept protected in the bucket for a reason, so I’m leaving them until I can ask my brother if he knows what they’re for. There were a few other little things that joined the collection of rotted wood in the shopping cart, and one thing that was definitely a keeper. The temporary grave marker used for my late brother until the memorial stone was installed a year later. It’s just a simple board cut into a cross at the top, with my brother’s name and dates engraved on a little brass plate. It’s got some moisture damage on it, but that’s likely from the year it spent outside than any damage here in the basement. My oldest brother made it, and I definitely don’t want to loose track of it.
I’m rather pleased with the progress made today.
Hhhmmm. I suddenly can’t remember if I turned one of the lights off. One last trip to the basement, and I’m done for the next while! :-D
Today, I went back to finish up that last corner of the basement section I was working on yesterday. Altogether, I only put in an hour, and the rest will have to wait.
There were so many things I found while clearing the corner of the basement that, though I didn’t even get pictures of all of them, I had to give them their own post!
I really, really wonder about some of the stuff I uncovered!
The Re-Farmer 