The crypt is gone

When we moved in to the house, we inherited what soon became known, to us anyway, as the crypt. It was supposed to be a picnic table, but it really looked like something a dead body would be found in. Or Dracula's summer home.

Anyway, it was useless as a picnic table unless you were (a) a child, or (b) had femurs that were less than 30 cm long. Just great... If you, as a normal human being, sat it in it and managed to get your knees under the table top, your butt would have been setting about 4 inches back from the far edge of the bench. But, we never did anything with it as it was a family "heirloom" that our old neighbors had shared with her family. She had grown up in our house and moved in with her husband next door to us. We just couldn't bring ourselves to ask them if we could take it out when they lived here. Once our new neighbors, Zack and Charlene moved in though, we immediately decided to take it out. Megan and I were thinking of waiting until cooler weather prevailed as it's been hot and humid here. Zack and Charlene had different ideas though. We came home one day and Zack had started breaking off the top of the table (a 4" thick piece of solid concrete, with rebar) and the base (lots and lots of cinderblocks). We were severely disappointed that it was not a crypt!!! The whole base was solid cinderblocks except for maybe a 1.5 cm gap between the two long rows of blocks. Pooey!

Here you can see the power sledge team at work. Bunk and Mary (neighbors from across the alley) have come over to supervise. Supervising manual labor is always a specialty of Bunk's. :) Charlene and Megan decided she needed to adopt some of the volunteer basil overtaking our garden, so they made a home for it in last year's tomato patch.

Megan and I spent a lot of time hauling off this initial debris. It eventually took us 14 loads in our "truck" (please read Brett's LRC here) to the local dump to get rid of it all. The last piece to get rid of was the base. Again, it was solid concrete, about 4" thick, but this time very little rebar in it. The problem was it was flat on the ground. Smacking it with the sledgehammer didn't do much since it was well supported. Megan and I decided to see if we could pry it up and put some cinderblocks underneath it and then hit it. We knew that would do the trick, but the prying it up was gonna be the hard part. We used the pry bar and slowly levered the whole pad up. Then it was time to take out some aggression on the concrete!


There it is - all broken up. I wish we'd had more pictures of the destruction process, but we didn't know Zack and Charlene were going to start on it so soon! And then we forgot about it in the excitement of the destruction. We're going to fill it in with some dirt for now and put grass over it. Megan and I are looking forward to, hopefully, next year taking out the rest of our concrete pad out our back door and putting in a brick/stone patio that extends around the corner here, out to our property line, to make a nice summer evening retreat. And yes, I'm pretty pleased to have it gone.