OK, so not quite 16 tons. It was “Fall Cleanup” today and you could either call the city and have them haul stuff away from the curb or you could take it to the Transfer Station for free. We chose the latter. Jeanette loaded the truck yesterday and this morning, took it to the transfer station while I snuck off to the radio club monthly meeting. When I got back, she had already mostly loaded it again and we went off to the Transfer again.
When you get there, you drive onto the scale and they weigh you. make sure you are from Norman (a little loose on this) and get the last four digits of your phone number. Then you run up to the transfer station, back in and unload your junk. From there, big front end loaders smoosh all the junk to the back edge of the building, which is actually a trough. Down in the trough are big 18-wheeler trash trucks that then take all your junk to a landfill. If there isn’t a truck there, big steel flappy thingies stop the stuff from falling into the trough. Ugly, but necessary, apparently. When you’re done, you weigh again, they figure the net, and you’re on your way.
This time, I asked the lady what our net weight was: 280 lbs. Back to the house. The next load was remnant of a bathroom remodel. Well, I hear you saying, you got the bathroom done quickly! No, this was from the last remodel.
When we set up the house insurance, the Allstate folks looked up our address in the magical insurance industry claims database. Evidently, there had been two water damage claims (against State Farm) in 2002 (I think) for over $8000 total. When we asked the sellers’ agent about this, the sellers had no idea what we were talking about. Eventually, they “remembered” that the floor of the shower in the master bath had “broken” and caused the damage. Yeah, well, whatever: they didn’t just fix the problem, they redid the whole thing. Scam? Dunno.
So if you are a hick in Oklahoma and you’ve just redone your bathroom at the insurance company’s expense, what do you do with the debris? Well, you throw it into the bushes off the side of your pond, of course! But what if, say, the edge of your pond where you throw the stuff is on your neighbor’s land? Well, what of it? It’s gone ain’t it?
So we cleaned it all up (and the 3 busted up car batteries) and hauled it to the Transfer Station. The net this time: 760 lbs! Not surprising considering it was all tile, cement-board, and concrete chunks (the batteries, along with the other two they left, go to the Household Hazmat cleanup in the Spring).
We figured that the first load in the morning was like the second, so figure another 275 or so, making the grand total of junk left by the previous owners roughly 1315 lbs or nearly 3/4 of a ton.
Of course, we (meaning Jeanette) already took two truckloads to the Transfer Station. Figure another 500 lbs there and we’re damn close to having hauled 1 full ton of trash from the property.
Did I mention that we’ve got at least one more truckload to go? 🙂 At least this time, some of it will be “ours”.