Commission Impossible

I'm sorry - you hit my button here, waste management is my "pet peeve."

I don't know how you ended up with your pile of wood, but I think a lot of people do "home improvement" projects without thinking about the waste they are creating. Your story is one good reason to think twice before you throw stuff away, or even before you do a project in the first place.

Our next door neighbor, stung by developer Karen Van Ness' remarks about our neighborhood being "shabby," decided to tear down her perfectly good redwood fence and replace it with a new cedar fence. Her redwood fence was fine, but she wanted a NEW fence. She had no concerns for what treated wood does to the environment, she just wanted a quick fix to spruce up her house. I must admit, fresh cedar sure is pretty. But we told her, look at our fence, it only looked pretty til the first rainy season and then there's what you get - a plain old fence. In fact, everybody in the neighborhood complained our cedar fence was UGLY - until they got a look at Venus, our pit bull.

Neighbor lady wouldn't listen, went out and spent a couple thousand on fence wood and got some hack carpenter down the street to throw it up for her. The result? It looks terrible. She was the first to complain. The old redwood fence looked really solid, this new one looks like it's made from matchsticks. Redwood "ages" - cedar just gets old.

When her hack tore down the old fence, he just left it in a pile on our property. Told her, "why don't you ask your neighbors if they want it, saves you the cost of me taking it to the dump." So we took it, mostly out of pity for our dumb neighbor. But we found most of it was still perfectly good. He had destroyed some boards tearing them off the fence, some had a little rot, but there was a lot of good wood there. My son immediately whipped out a gorgeous birdhouse for a friend's birthday party - it was the hit of the party.

Since then, we have steadily used the boards to mend our older fences. I think it looks groovy, like the patchwork on my grandpa's overalls.

I don't know why you are disposing of this wood - maybe it's trashed and useless. But - nag, nag, nag - if it's still useable, you should use it for something. You should see the shed we made with leftovers from our garage. It started when the cement truck driver asked us if we had a place he could dump the excess cement - instead of directing him to some out of the way spot where he could leave a big mess of cement chunks to go to the landfill, my husband grabbed some old boards lickety-split and built forms for not one but two 4 x 6 tool sheds. Within minutes the forms were poured and the cement guy was washing out and on his way. When the garage was done we took scraps of siding, etc and made this adorable little shed - sure beats the hell out of those crappy metal sheds. We use the other cement base as a stand for our garbage/recycling cans.

Waste not, want not.

Lon,

I really like working with the P-T wood cause the splinters in your hand get infected within 12 hours and you can pop them out like zits and get back to work. "Better living through chemicals".

Juanita,

In this case I got lucky. I only had 4 rather small pieces of the wood turned back, two could be reused, the other two are only a couple of feet long each. They were on the top of my load, otherwise probably would have been dumped.

Another guy at the dump was unloading half his truck with the stuff so he could dump what they'd accept and take those babies back home with him.

I would recommend anyone building new fences to use metal posts. I suspect a lot of folks around Butte County will be dealing with this rule in the next decade.

I doubt many of them will drive to Marysville to obey state mandates.

Lon

TJ,

Wear some gloves for god's sake. I've never had "zit splinters", but I've only used the wood for fence posts, and that's a pretty infrequent job.

However, I was building a wall out of cinder blocks and I started smoothing some of the morter with my bare hand. About 60 seconds later I felt a stinging sensation. After cleaning off the stuff my hand was pock-marked where bits of flesh were missing.

That was some serious chemical action.

Lon