Kijiji Queen Wood Mulch

I do not take my nickname of "Kijiji Queen" lightly. I take a lot of pride on being able to get items inexpensively or free if they are reasonable driving distance from our house. Additionally, I LOVE to get rid of things on the site as well (remember all of the wood from our deck removals??). To add carbon matter and ground cover to our future food forest and beef up our outdoor compost bins, I began the search for wood mulch. Within a week or so, I found an arborist that would deliver 4-6 yards of mulch only for the cost of delivery (about $65).

Other than about 1.5 yards that friends took to use, we made use of all of the mulch. Here is a close-up of the mulch. It was steaming and already full of fungal growth--perfect for our pending food forest!

The future food forest looks a lot more polished and ready for some cherry trees.

Next up: Growth on our urban farm

Mind if I dismantle the deck?

I called Tim at work on October 29th to ask him if he minded if I started ripping apart the deck. "Sure, go for it." Not knowing how motivated I was to get rid of the expansive grey deck with rotting stairs, I got to work right away.

First, I started by turned off the breaker to the electrical work and began removing the non functioning lights.

Next came the lattice bottom border and railings, then I started prying up boards. This is when Tim came home and was dumbfounded that I had gotten this far.

The next morning, a beautiful fall day, we got to work ripping up all the boards. Tim was using the pry bar while I pounded back the nails and sawed some of the pieces in smaller chunks for easy transport.

By the end of the day, nearly all of the pieces were removed and relocated to the alley for easy pick up. We saved some of the larger beams and better pieces for future (yet to be determined) projects. Within 1 week of posting "Free lumber" on Kijiji, all of the wood was gone and avoided the landfill!

SOOOO happy the ugly deck is gone!

Kijiji started the concrete cutting

We knew from early on in our homeownership that we wanted to remove a large part of the concrete in the backyard. Throughout the summer, we were making plans on what to do with the expanse of concrete. We got a few quotes to remove the concrete and they all came in over $1000. The money nor the desire to have the concrete going to the landfill were wishes of ours. Considering the great luck we had with buying, selling, and giving away things on Kijiji, we thought we would try posting "Concrete free for the taking." Besides some very lewd responses to the ad ("How dare you ask someone to rip up concrete for free" etc.), no one was interested. This lack of response, spurred our interest trying to break up the slab with a sledgehammer to make "urbanite" for others to use. The pieces did not come apart easily. The small area that Tim broke up below took 1.5 hours...

We decided to rent a concrete saw (instead of breaking our backs) to cut the slab into more easily moved blocks. Here Pam and Tim are ready to start at 8am sharp on October 23, 2010:

Pam and I did the majority of the cutting which lasted 8 hours with only a few breaks for coffee, lunch, and refueling.

Here is the finished product:

Tim and I pulled out the larger pieces to the alley for people to take. Little did we know that would be a futile effort... more on that in a much later post.

Events like this bring out dedicated friends to help--thanks Pam!