To bin or not to bin...

Simultaneously to the house coming down, we are now experiencing some pretty challenging logistics problems on the job site.

The demolition comes in two phases. First, the front facade of the house and the "guts" are pushed inside the "pit" and three walls are left standing. They will load all the debris from that first wave of demolition into bins and clear up the pit. The second phase consists in pushing the remaining walls in and taking away that load which is mostly bricks. Anyhow, witnessing the talks about what needed to be done and how it would be done was pretty interesting and kind of frustrating.

The main problem we have to deal with right now is to get the bins close enough to the pit to load them up and take them away. We need a total of 50 bins and so far, we were able to load... ZERO on the property! That sounds promising. The thing is, the access to the front lawn is very VERY difficult and the discussions this morning were about "how are we going to bring these babies up". Well, it looked almost as painful as the G-8 meetings... BIG PROBLEMS... RIDICULOUS/UNACHIEVABLE SOLUTIONS involving the goodwill of others... Forget it... It was, in fact, close to this:

Well, OK, obviously... not really, it wasn't even close to that.  It looked more like 5 guys at loose ends, pulling their hair out (or what was left of it for some), trying to come up with some kind of a solution. Granted, the problem is quite substantial but it sounded like we were going nowhere. It turns out that we need to widen the lane way to access the front pad with the truck. And this requires the City's approval: JESUS, are you fucking kidding me??? Please let's not involve the City in this, it is going to take 200 weeks to get the go-ahead and we can't afford to delay the project any further. Guys, LET'S KEEP THE CITY OUT OF  THIS!!!! Is anybody paying attention here??? I guess not (see picture above... *_*).

Let's see what comes out of a week-end of intense thinking about how to get what we want without having to deal with more bureaucracy and stupid permits. Now, this got me wondering: what's worse? Dealing with the City or with the neighbors? I'd say if I could avoid dealing with either one of them, it would be grand... but that's wishful thinking. Interacting with the City is plain frustrating because there are so many absurd and arbitrary rules to follow, it turns everything into an assault course. The thing is, the City doesn't necessarily want you to FAIL, and that's the main difference with the neighbors-from-hell. They will do everything to see you bomb. So I'll pick the City over them, any day of the week, thank you very much!