My Old House

Hallelujah!

Yesterday, I paid a local hauling company $125 to haul off all of the old asbestos siding that I had removed from the house in recent months.

And we are OH-SO-HAPPY that it is finally gone!

I had bagged all of the asbestos and tar paper into contractor’s trash bags.  And even then, I could only fill them half-way before they became way too heavy to handle. 

As a temporary measure, I moved all of the bags to just outside the north wall of the garage.  And there they sat, all 35 (roughly) of them.

I had called Kansas City’s Hazardous Waste dump, but was told that asbestos siding is NOT considered to be hazardous waste!  They said that that stuff would have to be ground down to a powder in order to be dangerous.  They said my regular trash company should take it.

So, I put ONE BAG out with our regular trash.  And they refused to take it.

That was several weeks ago.  I’ve been waiting to come up with the money to dispose of all the bagged asbestos since then.

Once in the past, I tried using our normal trash company, Deffenbaugh, to dispose of something special.  And in my opinion, they charged me way too much, considering the quantity of trash I had.

So, I knew not to use them for this job.

Instead, I grabbed a copy of the “Thrifty Nickel” newspaper.  (Yeah, I know it’s now called “American Classifieds”, but there are still plenty of people out there who refer to it as the “Thrifty Nickel”.)   They had about 6-8 trash haulers listed.  I circled two ads.  One ad said that the guy would haul anything that would fit in his 10-foot trailer (with sides) for $125.  That was my SECOND choice.  I wanted to see if anybody would beat that.  I called “Gray’s Hauling” and Mr. Gray said the cost would be $100-125… but that he’d prefer to see the stuff first before giving a firm quote.

I figured that was fine.

In the end, I paid $125 anyways.  I kind of figured that’s what it would be, given how many bags I had.

But disposing of it was nice, easy, and quick.  I didn’t have to call my trash company, get them to drop off a dumpster, and then wait for them to come back again to pick it up.   Nope, 15 minutes of loading and my troubles were gone!

Now I’ve got to save up some money for stump grinding.

We had a friend work with me two Saturdays ago, trying to use a kind of winch called a “come-along”…along with my pickup truck, to try to remove the huge bushes just off our front porch.  Well, we did manage to remove one medium-sized bush with it.

However, when we tried to pull out one of the two really-monster-sized ones, we snapped the come-along’s steel cable in two. 

So, since the bushes basically have no more greenery on them (I removed all of that several weeks ago), I think calling a stump grinder is now in order.   We have two large bushes and one medium bush with stumps that need to be ground-up.

I figure it will probably be another payday or two before we get this done.

Thanks for stopping by the site!

-= Dave =-