Ok, not much work done on the ’69 truck this year. Summary……………..leak /mini flood in my home and trying to get a garage built at Melina house that will be a new home for her car, my truck and the old truck. It has been a lot of work. The main time consumer or waster…………getting people to work.

First to show you the prep work for the new garage. This is where two trees were that had to be removed. Don’t have a before picture readily available……………but this is the crew working after the trees were cut down. Pretty big trees…….take a look at the stumps, literally 4ft around. These were old maple trees I think, I am not sure but they were not oaks.

Here is another shot showing the extent of the wood. The tree service hauled off most the of the branches. A neighbor got a couple of friends and they cut up what you see here for some friends of theirs that have a wood burning stoves so they could have free wood to burn. They cut it up, hauled it off and split the big pieces up. This cost me $1800 for the two trees.

After this the stumps has to be removed. The tree service that removed the trees up until this point did not have the equipment to remove stumps only grind them. This was the first sign of trouble. It took me calling about 10 or 12 tree service people to find someone that actually removed stumps not just grind them. You should not put a concrete foundation over where a ground stump is. Its only ground down a couple of feet and covered in dirt. When this stump rots the ground will sink and your concrete will crack. So no go with that.

Once I found a guy that did stump removal this ensued….

He was a real nice guy and a ex-military guy trying to get a business going so I helped him out. But this alone was another $1800

Here are some pictures of the back yard after all the wood and stumps removed. Still 1 hole left to fill in, there was enough dirt after the stumps removed to fill in one hole pretty good.

Still a pretty big hole to fill in later. I had to recover a little from the $$$ spent so far so I waited about a month and worked on getting a builder for my garage and a guy to do the concrete work. Went with a metal building due to be it being a whole lot cheaper that a stick built (like a house) garage. Here far go:

Stick built $65,000 vs about $49,000 for the metal building and concrete. Honestly $49,000 for a metal building is too much for a 32ft. by 32ft. garage. But, I shopped around with about 8 different builders in the area and this is what it costs. I went with a Mennonite builder. They were local, easy to work with and had a few features that others charges extra for.

But first me burning up some of the scraps of leftovers from the tree removal

As you can see the old shed is still in one of the pictures above. That also had to go. So we had to move everything out of it and into the garage on the house. It’s still in there by the way…….and we had to get it sold. Melina posted it on Facebook marketplace and it sold the next day but it took the guy about three weeks to come get it. Glad to see it go but a delay. I think she has some pictures of it getting hauled off…will get them on here later. See the temporary fence is where the shed was, where all the blocks are. ……..we had to put it up so Magnum aka dorkhead could not get out. This is netting you put around a garden so deer can’t get in, but it worked for this purpose.

Here is the backyard with the shed removed:

Anyway got to get the concrete done. Here is this getting done:

Ok it took about two weeks after the shed was gone to get them out but I felt hey did a good job and the concrete is very smooth. I can’t say much about the price here. My 24ft x 24ft garage I had built about 15 years ago at my house cost a lot less overall but the concrete work for that was $6500 and this was $11,000. Bigger pad and 15 years later and with the price of everything so high I was ok with that. They also filled in the hole left behind by the stumps and packed that dirt.

Getting the garage built Watsons metal came out and started to build the garage after about a week so the concrete could cure. Here is that going up:

Now to get the fence fixed so Magnum aka Dorkhead still can’t get out and we can actually walk in the garage. As you can see the fence is still in front of the garage.

Here is more:

Here are some pictures of the progress as of now. We also had the old carport removed no pictures of that. Some gravel moved to meet up with the garage. Oh…….the apron is not done yet in the above pictures. That took 2 months for the guy to come finish this Melina and I were getting very upset at this. But he finally did and really did a good job as you can see in the below pictures. I also have gotten the 4 front lights on I also got the plants put on the sides. Here is pics on that where we are at.

Things still left to do:

• Power from the house
• Power plugs and wiring inside the garage
• More cleanup around the garage
• Planning on some bird feeders and houses on the left side
• Plants on the front in planters

More to come…………..

Here is the newer engine that will be going into the old truck. It does not look like much now, but I will in a separate post on the build up of this engine, as best I can.