Where We Were - 1992. Nauseating in more ways than one

In pawing through all the old photographs of the yard progress, there's a distinct lack of documented evidence to just how bad the yard was, at its height in the 1990s.

It was only in 2001 or so when we started to clean things thoroughly and document the evidence. This happened to coincide with the dawn of digital photography, so photos would be shot of the progress. These photos would become more plentiful as memory cards got bigger and cheaper.

But for pretty much that whole decade of the 90s there was no reason to waste precious film on pictures of junk! So very little evidence exists of how junkyardariffic this acre and a half property really was.

And- for most of the 90s Thalia and I were fresh out of high school and seemingly powerless to do anything about the junk, then later on busy at college or working and living somewhere else. Couple this with the fact that dad's business was pretty much winding down to a trickle and you get a situation where there were a grand total of 70-something cars in the yard plus lumber, junk, car parts, metal chunks, rusty rust, etc.. etc...

In 1992 I was in video school and I had built a homemade steadi-cam of sorts. I'm not sure if it was a success or not, but I tested the contraption by running out the front door and bounding across the roofs of the cars in the yard like a slower and slightly more cautious version of parkour freerunning. And here is the result, if you can stomach it.

So grab a paper bag and just let your eyes glaze over. Can you count how many cars there are in the yard? There's about 50 visible here, though there's about 6 indoors and another 20 or so not visible.

What is noticeable here is that the cars are all over the yard at this point in time, whereas in the 2000s they have at least been consolidated to one location. What are now great expanses of green and a usable driveway were just parking lots for non-running vehicles back then. And disclaimer: those last 5 seconds or so are an actual parking lot nearby, not our yard. I can't even imagine how much worse the yard would have been if the 78 cars were Cadillacs or some other land yachts. They'd take up twice as much space!

-Tara

Where We Were.. Where do we even start? - Summer 2004

We've got a new problem with Tetanus Burger, and it has to do with an overabundance of things...

No, not the hoard of junk, but the hoard of photographs taken of the junk, that predate this very blog. We've taken thousands of photographs over the past 10 years of the progress we have made. If you thought there was a lot of stuff now, wait till you see what we've already carted away! It's a little recurring section called "Where We Were".

And yet like attacking the junk, it's difficult to know even where to start with posting some of the photos. So for this installment, I've picked at random the Summer of 2004.

Back then, the Red Sox were just another team of lovable losers, we thought maybe John Kerry was a shoe-in for President, and it seems we were starting to make some genuine headway on the crap in the yard. This was the first summer we were more or less given carte blanche to do what was necessary.

Back then we were uncovering piles upon piles of rotted lumber, spare oil tanks (how the hell are you supposed to get rid of those?) 55 gallon drums full of broken glass and mystery liquids (what- we won't say, all we'll say is they're gone), extra storm windows brought home from the town dump, etc. etc..







Piles of iron? I know there's always more, but there was much more in the past, back when we were just hauling it to the dump and not getting any money for it either.



Cars? Well there were a lot more of them, in any color you want as long as it's rust. Keen observers can see that a few of these cars have been offered new leases on life or have simply earned a last minute reprieve from a certain and ugly execution.

What better place to store car seats which someone presumably saved since they were "GOOD!", than outdoors year after year in the snow, rain and sun? Better call Germany and tell those Volkswagen engineers how durable their "leatherette" fabric really is after 20 years of rigorous testing!



Oh, and that rusty rectangular tank to the left of those blue and mold colored seats? Some sort of parts cleaning bin that was half full of some nasty parts-cleaning liquid.. All gone, though I don't recall how we got rid of it. I think we brought it to the dump and dumped it into their waste oil. Anyway, it's gone. When I see people freaking out over recycling a foil wrapper off a burrito or a teaspoon of oil... I can't get very worked up about it considering what we've had to deal with.





Well, that's it for this installment. In our next riveting episode, we pay our respects to some of our honored dead. Yes, they came to this property, believing they would be restored, only to be thrown into the Colosseum and pitted against the undefeated champion, "The Claw".



Who will win? Find out!!

The way, way, way way WAY back machine...

Posted by Tara.

As bad as the yard seems now, it should be duly noted that it was much, much worse...

I've gone through my computer hard drive to find some photos from the dawn of the digital photo age, when 640x480 was "high resolution". Bear with me as a few of these panoramas and photos aren't quite up to today's standards (unless you've got that photo-enhancing software they always have in movies, where it can add detail that isn't there to begin with...)

So, first off, let's see where we were back in 2001. These are some of the earliest photos we took as we started to deal with a problem that had spiraled out of control for 30+ years. This was back in the days when Dad still lived at home. He wasn't working on VW's anymore and was cognisant enough to still be fighting our efforts. However, not long before these were taken, he actually gave up on 15 cars and let a scrapyard take them away at once. What we're seeing in these photos is after they had left (they were in an area called "the pen", which would have been in the right rearmost part of the next picture). At that point there were probably 50 or 60 on the property (down from a maximum of 78 in the early 1990's).


And here's the area (below) that is barely visible in the above photo, center right.


Out of these 2 pictures the only cars that remain non-crushed are the red Karmann-Ghia (inside the shop now), and the red camper bus (undergoing restoration elsewhere and soon to be back on the road - mostly to haul VW parts to swap meets!).

Oh, and I think one of the red bugs in the 2nd photograph is still around, but it won't be for long.

Fast forward a few years to Spring 2003, and sadly things don't look much better, but they are. Lots of other parts of the yard have been cleaned up, but what was left was stuck in one area, so it actually looks worse.


Now looking from atop the attic of the shop, we see that was behind it in then. I hate to admit it, but I wasn't helping things much as 4 or 5 of the cars here belong to me, either as a result of "That's cool, I want it", or I was driving it in the recent past. And I had recently bought the Citroen 2cv which is off to the left (and now nicely restored and lives elsewhere). Of what we see here, the only cars still on the property are the black Saab and the red beetle, both slated to leave, either whole or in pieces. And the random chunks o' Saab Sonnet are still there too (the blue and grey 1/2 cars).

Lastly, let's see a before and after of the area behind the two story garage. Before is May 2001, After is April 2003. Still lots to do, and nature had really taken over things at this point. Sort of like that show "Life After People", eh?



The only thing left in these photos is the fender-less Citroen DS (because is IS a bona-fide classic car), which is a parts car for a rust-free one I own. With parts being so scarce that's why it's still here. However, one needs to follow through with plans for constructive car fixin' which is difficult when you're constantly sidetracked by the getting rid of crap along the way.

So as bad as things look now, we have made progress! I don't live here anymore, but I do live close by. I often think of coming over to work on something constructive, but the story has been - for years and years- that any plans get sidetracked by the getting-rid-of-worthless (or worse, stuff you have to pay to dispose of) -stuff sometimes just so you can clear a path or clear an area to work on something. I guess I never realized that it would take a decade to get over this hurdle, but I'm happy to accelerate the pace just to get to the cool and/or worthwhile stuff.

-Tara

Where We Were, Part 2 -mid June 2010 - Life Raft from Underground

Easily the most useless thing that our dad brought home from the dump, a 15 foot rubber life raft from some sort of ship.

Behind the green once-Saab, under piles and piles of tires, was this "thing". A twisted mass of rubber and vinyl that had been employed as "ground cover" more than anything. I suspect dad thought he could use it to "cover something" or something like that.

It's impossible to tell what this thing was from the photos, and it had to be dragged out by chaining it to a car. Once out into the open yard, I laid it all flat and discovered it originally was about 15 feet long, with two layers of inflatable tubes, some sort of lights built into it, and divided into 3 sections. I think it also had some sort of flares attached to it on ropes, and all sorts of various directions and stuff. It was pretty old, as the lack of safety orange seemed to indicate.

Whatever it was originally for, it was now trash that was now nearly impossible to get rid of. It was partly under the root system of all sorts of horrible weeds and also very wet from the rainwater that had been basting inside the tires, now as a sauce in which a whole mosquito civilization had seen it's genesis. Utterly disgusting and useless (it was already full of holes 25 years ago), it had to be cut up into 4 manageable pieces and rolled up and put into 4 very large 40 gallon garbage bags.

Thankfully we were still on un-restricted garbage pick up (they have since changed over to buy-your-own town bags), and they picked it up no questions asked.. They were very heavy, to say the least.

Yet it still begs the question.. Why do we own this? Once again, he saved that?

-Tara

Where We Were, Part 1 -mid June 2010

Truth be told, we should have started this blog 10 or 15 years ago, but alas the junk in the yard predates the internet. As big a project going through everything in the yard is, making sense of the thousands of pictures we have taken of the progress is a project in itself! So begins this series "Where We Were" - where we reach back in time to see what we already got rid of before Tetanus Burger came into being.

So let's work our way backwards, to see what went away earlier in June, 2010. Directly preceding the brown VW bus was this choice example of Swedish engineering.

It once was an early 1970's Saab 96. Some time between the early 1970's and now, it has become one with the earth, even so much so that a small tree had taken root on top of the car itself sprouting out from under the passenger side wiper arm. Nope, not through the car (as I've seen a lot of), but literally growing from the nourishing soil that had accumulated on the surface of the car!


This particular thing (which I really think you couldn't call a car anymore), had so deteriorated that I decided the best way to move it was to saws-all off the windshield pillars and try to wrangle it apart into two easier to move chunks. Even then the passenger door refused to unlatch and took another few days of wrestling with a crowbar to get it all apart. And even then the suspension in the front section was so attached to nothing, that the two tires would not point in the same direction.

The back half was easier to move, resembling a rickshaw more than anything at this point.



So we called around to places that would take this "car" away, and found it far more difficult than we had expected. Most places would not touch it since it had zero title or paperwork (and we had "owned" it so long without it ever being registered, and it was acquired during a period when you didn't need titles on cars more than 15 years old). In one telephone call I even argued with some idiot kid to told me that "without a title, how would we know it's not stolen", where he basically said that it must be stolen if it has no title! It's interesting that it's qualifies as "a car" to the town who wants you to clean up your yard, but not to the only people who can take it away.

Other places were not interested in it because it was so old, so rusty, or in two pieces, especially any of the advertised "Junk Cars removed for free" operations. Finally one junkyard agreed to take it, and even give us money for it! I then learned not to be quite so forward in the future with the condition of these said once-auto-mobiles (and since quite immobile).


Rather like the two fragments of the Titanic resting on the bottom of the ocean (no doubt in better shape than this car), the two sections waited for a few days until the junk man cometh! Thankfully they gave us some real money for it ($100 I think), which is absolutely amazing since I seem to remember that our dad bought it as a junk parts car back in like 1988 for $25. It goes to show you, things can appreciate with age, just not usefulness.

When the junkyard guy came by, he seemed a little disappointed that the iron content was so low (but percentage wise, probably more than a modern car, which has lots of plastic). To sweeten the deal we put the front half of the Saab on an old trailer, which was mostly iron.

But they were happy to take it away, and happy enough to take the Bus the next week, which we filled with fenders and other crap. In the case of the Saab, I made sure to take advantage of the 5 tires per car quota, and even tossed in a VW seat since one of the Saab seats was missing.

Yep, this car is stolen! Better call the cops on us! We're running a chop shop for $25 rusty cars. Right.

-Tara