Concrete demolition today

Today I had scheduled a "lowboy" to be delivered. It's a construction dumpster for concrete. Because concrete is so heavy, putting it into a normal, 20+ feet long by 8 feet high dumpster would make the dumpster too heavy to move. So the lowboy is about 3 feet tall. I had a city permit for no parking zone in front of the house from today at 7 a.m. to next Thursday at 5 p.m. Officially, the dumpster company delivers from 8 a.m. on, but I've had many dumpster deliveries that were long done by the time I arrived at 8 a.m. So to be sure things went smoothly, I arrived at 7:15 to make sure there were no cars in my no parking zone. Thank goodness there were none. I would have had to tow them, and that would not make for good neighbor relations. The dumpster came around 8 a.m., and all went smoothly. It is really amazing to watch them deliver it in a narrow street.

The windows were delivered today! I am really happy to have them and they look great. One thing that isn't so great is the bathroom window is supposed to have obscured, "pebbly" type glass so people can't see in from the walkway of the neighboring building. The lame guy at the window store (who has, by this time, made a multitude of errors) didn't have a sample from the brand of windows we purchased, but he showed us a sample from another company and said "it's just like this." In fact, it's not anything like what he showed us, and is not anywhere near obscure enough to be in a bathroom. What a moron! As I've said before about this guy, it's fine not to know something, but don't speak authoritatively as if you do know when you don't! We're not sure what we're going to do. The contractor said we could try to return it and force them to make it right. We can also use an etching spray on the outside pane of glass which will cloud it. Between that and the somewhat-obscured glass on the inside it should be fine. There are also stick-on films for this purpose, and if done correctly they look okay. This window faces the side walkway of the house too, which is a utility area so it's more important that it looks good from the inside than the outside.

I spent the afternoon at home researching appliances. It's harder than it seems! There are a million minute options, and even if you pick one type of appliance (e.g. a side-by-side refrigerator) there are several dozen model numbers from every one of the many manufacturers. Most of the model numbers are 15 digits long and differ by one digit from model to model (e.g. JSH1098T1234 vs. JSH1098U1234). One guy told us they do that to manage stock. They change one small detail, and the altermate production so one is always in stock. Whatever. But, we are making progress, and once this is done we can nail the kitchen design. We were supposed to have them ordered yesterday, but since the overall schedule has slipped a bit, we are probably fine if we do it in the next few days.

The big news of today is that the front wall is down! It looks so much better already, even thought the front yard is still trashed. Between the bars being off, the wall down and the new roof, the front looks a lot better. So many neighbors have come by and said something nice about it.

One not so nice thing though, people treat our front yard like a dumping ground. There was a foot massager left last Friday morning, lots of unscooped dog poop, and today after the trash had been picked up, someone put a very smelly bag of trash back in my trash can. Not only do I have to keep this smelly mess around for a week, but now we may not be able to fit our own trash in. We're still working on trying to get rid of the trash left by the prior owner. I think people just think it's okay to treat our place like crap since we're not living there and it looks so bad. This is really lame - I mean it's obvious we're doing work and it's ultimately going to better the neighborhood.

Here is shot of our newly liberated front yard: