Tree clearing

Next step is to get rid of some pine trees at the back of the lot that we decided not to keep.



Kory will be cutting these up and chipping what he can into mulch over the next 2-3 days.

House Demolished

Kenley came into town and finished demolishing /clearing the house. He brought up a Bobcat configured as a skid-loader and one of his dump trucks. We rented an excavator from a local company. Some of the debris was hauled away, some was buried on site.


Here is the picture of the house when the FD finished.



Here is the picture taken Saturday, with the house demolished. This is from the road.


This is from the back of the lot. (The standing water is where we've relocated some trees temporarily)

House Burn

The burn is complete. It was an exciting couple of days with lots of activity. Below is a series of pictures that show the house from prep, to practice burn to raging inferno to a pile of ashes.


The fire dept setup a series of "fire boxes" made of pallets



And straw.


They patched all of the holes in the drywall and reinforced the drywall behind each of the fire boxes.


After day 1, there wasn't a lot of external damage. They mainly trained in the upstairs area.



After day two, the house was looking pretty ragged. They'd finished their training.




They set the final fire right at 10am on Wednesday morning.


Within minutes the entire house was engulfed.


There were a total of 29 cadets that trained on the house. They graduate from fire academy in a couple more weeks.








The proud owner (and his minion)





The garage had quite a bit of trash, scrap lumber, etc in it.


This was about 30-35 minutes into the burn.








This was about an hour into it.


The FD let it smolder and burn down as much as possible.


Then they hosed it down.





And here is all that's left.

This weekend, we get to clear the pile of rubble. Kenley is coming to town and we're renting a large excavator. We're planning to sell the scrap metal (I beams, wiring, etc), haul the misc debris to the dump and bury the concrete / brick on site.

Ready for the burn

We've finished prepping the lot. The power is disconnected, the trees we wanted to save are relocated, everything of value is out of the house and the FD is ready to arrive in the morning.

The FD doesn't notify the neighbors, so we've decided to print out a flyer and drop it off at the 100 or so houses most likely to be affected. Basically we'll warn them to close their windows, etc. We've offered to power wash the houses of the two families right next to us. Hopefully the smoke and soot won't make things too nasty for them.

Building Permit Attempt #1

We'd been told that New Albany would accept the permit application in two pieces. The site plan and exterior details as one phase, then the detailed internal plans as another phase. When Danielle went to submit the first phase today she was told that they no longer accept things that way. They want the application to be complete.

This is a bit annoying because we need detailed electrical and plumbing plans to submit the full packet. We're still collecting bids for those phases and probably won't have awarded till late next week.

Since the electrical and plumbing subs do those diagrams, that means we're probably two weeks away from being able to submit for the permit.