the return of the chute

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, if you celebrate, and an equally lovely Thursday, if you don't. We had a nice time at Don's parents, and I spent the rest of the weekend selling jewelry at a convention while Don, predictably enough, played World of Warcraft. Work on the house is pretty much stalled until January -- Don's dad has too much to do between schoolwork and holiday preparations, and our weekends are filling up with events as well. But some things have gotten done, as I mentioned before. The project in progress right now is the upstairs floor. Don and his dad have ripped up most of the floorboards -- everything back to the third bedroom, where we're staying, and a little bit of hallway so we can get to the stairs. I'll post a picture later this week. In any case, when they ripped up the floorboards over the front porch, they discovered to their dismay that the builders of the house decided to add a little weatherproofing by pouring plaster -- the same crumbly, messy, gross plaster that we ripped down off of all of the walls -- down in between the joists over the porch. Needless to say, since we need to replace or repair all of those joists, that plaster has to come out.

And so out came the dumpster chute, pulled from its retirement in the garage to fight the good fight once again. I'm glad we saved it -- we didn't realize that WE would be the ones needing it again, but we were sure SOMEBODY would. This time, we've hung it inside the house; the plaster is all at the very front and there's no sense carrying it all the way to the back window when there's no floor to walk on. The chute is attached to one of the few walls still standing upstairs, and dangles down through the empty space between two joists into the living room and thence over the basement stairs to the side door. When they're working, Don and his dad can open the door and place a large barrel or another garbage can at the base of the chute, work til it's filled with plaster, then run down and upend it into the dumpster. I'm told it works pretty well. Don's planning on getting the rest of the plaster out himself sometime before January so that they can forge ahead with the new floor; we'll see how that goes.