Katherine was out in the yard today poking around in the soil, as she is wont to do, and she made an interesting discovery. You may be able to see in this photo that the land slopes up a bit in our backyard. The back is about two feet higher than the front. Turns out that "land" isn't quite the proper term in this instance. Landfill, more like it. An inch or two down, Katherine found all manner of debris - pavers, roofing material, scrap wood. She found a doorknob sticking up and pulled on it. It didn't move. Why? Because it was connected to a DOOR. Katherine's speculation is that this is that rather than hiring a hauling company, they just buried the debris from the fire in the back yard.
Did we mention the fire?
Apparently there was a fire on the top floor of the building, we think in the late sixties, which is why everything up there is so crappy. If you look at the picture from our April 16th post of the back upstairs bedroom, you can see some of the burn marks on the original wood floor we exposed. It also damaged the rafters, so the roof can't hold three layers of roofing, like a regular roof can - it needs to be fully replaced every time. So we may or may not spend $50k to rebuild the rafters. That's a problem for another day.
In any case, there's a ginormous amount of debris forming a miniature hill in our back yard. Perhaps good for skiing, not so good for gardening. That is a problem for another day as well.
