Bye Bye Garage and Hello Fall Decor!

The shed that we called our garage was in a terrible state of dilapidation.  It had survived accidently being set on fire years and years ago (before the ownership of Josh), but the old, warped boards had finally reached the end of their life span and we decided it was finally time for it to come down.  I'm not jesting when I say that whenever a storm started brewing this past and last summer, we thought the car would be safer parked in the driveway (at the risk of flying/falling debris and ginormous hail stones) than parked in the garage (at the risk of having the building blown in on top of it).  So one morning, Josh pulled up the driveway with the tractor and loader bucket and started the process of taking the old garage down!



The "before" picture.
This is our garage.  Back in its hayday, it was a nice little building... complete with doors that enclosed it.  But that was many, many moons ago!




The back of the garage was where the damage from the earlier mentioned fire was done.  It stay bowed out despite our (and by "our", I mean Josh's) many attempts to push it in.  It just didn't have enough of its own strength left to keep it in place. 




When Josh cleaned the building out from the knick-knack stuff that was stored in there, he discovered that the doors that used to be the front doors that were now stored in the back was what was propping the building up and keeping it from being folded in on itself.




This is Josh's mass weapon of destruction; it provided the height to get on top of the garage AND the power to push it over.... as you will soon see!




I'm pretty sure the plan was to salvage and reuse the tin that was the roof.  So, the first order of business was to take the roof off.  Josh pulled every single nail out and kept track of it until it was disposed of properly...something this over protective mama is very thankful for in regards to her little munchkins' feet!




Tiiiiiiiimbeeeeeeeeeeer!
(Timber)




Josh and Loren had a strategy to keep the building in a nice, neat pile to make for little cleanup.  They took down the roof area first. 




Josh working with his chainsaw to weaken some areas to make the building collapse a little easier.





Once they got the boards that were once the roof off, the sides pushed over quite easily.




There she goes! 




I forgot to mention that the tractor also carried off the junk.  (The white thingy in the upper right hand corner is a gourd birdhouse the kids made last year in Sunday School.)




Carrying away still more junk.




PUSH, Josh, PUSH!  Use those big muscles for something!   Just don't pop or break something...after all, you ARE getting up there in years, soon-to-be-Birthday Boy  ;-)
(I love you, Sweetie!)




And down goes the other side.  I guess those muscles just couldn't quite do the job :-)




Here's the "after" picture.  There footings and foundation are still there.  We have an idea of a way we can turn this area into a raised strawberry bed next year so my plants won't get washed away like this year.  But we'll see... there's alot of time between then and now, plenty of time to change our minds!

 While the men were destructing, Sarah Rose and I were creating:


For our family, the perfect symbol of Fall is the corn that we've been blessed to reap from our fields.  Here's Sarah Rose showing off the ear that she claimed was "hers".




Sarah Rose got that ear from the stalks of corn that she and I gathered from the field next to our house to help decorate our little buddy and give him  a cozier place to be for the next several weeks.  You can see in the background that the guys are still in the process of taking the garage down while the scarecrow was going up.




When Caleb got home from school, he was quite surprised to find the garage gone!  He helped out by gathering some branches that had to be trimmed from the trees in the driveway and placing them in the pile that had been started.   He felt so grown up to be able to help!




While Caleb was hard at work gathering branches, Sarah Rose was admiring her windmills.  I love this picture, despite the fact that she's sitting on one of my Lily of the Valleys.  (Which is okay, they were already abused by the weather this year and weren't doing much of anything anyway.)