Getting Rid Of The Orchid Farm

 Hello Blogland! Today I will show you what we had to demolish in our basement so we could have some decent storage space for , you know....storage. Okay, now to even begin to understand this house, I will give you a brief history. When this house was built years ago a man & is new young wife bought the place. They had one child who went on to become a Dentist & went by the nickname Doc. Now Doc moved away for a bit but when his parents died, he moved back into his childhood home. He lived here until he had a bad fall & was taken to the hospital & then to a rehab center. Sadly, Doc never made it out of rehab. He passed away. Doc was here, living by himself (he n ever married) for over 30yrs. Somewhere in that time the houses were sold all together. (Doc sold his part as well but continued to live here) They were sold to my husband's uncle & he just let who ever was living here stay. He bought it for the investment. After Doc passed away, a distant relative in New York asked my husband's uncle to have the place cleared out & the furniture to be donated to a church. I heard from neighbors that the antiques leaving the house were beautiful. (wish they could have stayed here). Doc in his declining years became a pack rat. An orchid growing pack rat. In the basement he constructed tables he filled with gravel & placed lighting for his plants. Before the fall, he stopped with the orchids but their growing place remained. Here is what they looked like:

 The top most tray with the bucket on it was stacked on top of two other growing trays. These trays were all filled with gravel. The aluminum pans were starting to rust pretty badly. Not sure just how long Doc was using these things. (or had stopped using them) We had to get that out of the basement. We used buckets. I filled & the Hubs went outside to dump them in their new home, covering the dirt walkway in the back of the house. There were six trays in all. Three were on a wooden table constructed in the basement & the other were on a metal shelf that was so old it was trying to collapse onto itself.

I did not get a pic of the metal shelf (thought I did) by itself. Here it is under some boxes the Hubs moved off of the trays that were on the table so we could start on them. It was mega dusty my Blogland friends so we had to cover our faces. I had a dust mask (little good it did in the end......I was blowing rust from my nose for quite a while) & the Hubs went at it bandit style.

Here is the Hubs in all his glory, ready to get to work.

Here is a shot of me digging in the mess with a garden trowel. I scooped & dug & scooped & dug for a very freakin' long time. 

 The Hubs suggested I use a shovel but that was killing my shoulders in no time flat so back to the trowel I went.

 Here is a shot of the Hubs prying some of the tray section away from where it was badly rusted. You can see on the bottom of the tray that is was pretty rusty

 Another shot of that & our handy dandy buckets

 The gravel & rusty trays are gone & it's time to break up the table cause it would not fit through the doorway to get it outside.

While moving the table from the wall we uncovered these guys:

 Not sure how old they are but they do have some age to them. They are on old caster wheels. I cannot wait to fix these bad boys up! As we have no storage closets, (& I mean none) these will be great for blankets & towels. One just might become a living room table, used for storage too of course!

 The insides need a total redo also. I wish it would stop raining cause I would love to take these guys outside to clean them up & dry in the sun.

Clean em up, new insides & some paint....you will not even recognize these babies!

Onto the new gravel walkway outback:

As you can see, we ended up with quite a bit of gravel. The holly bush you see to the right looks like this:

All wild & over grown. This is the next thing I have on the Hub's list of punishment duties he has to preform for not giving me the true lowdown on this house. It is now his job to trim this baby & get it looking good. (oh believe me, the list grows & grows!)

Stay tuned by Blogland Buddies. This house in the heart of Uniontown is going to keep me very, very busy or drive me nuts either one!

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