Let The Repairs Begin

Yesterday, Eric and his best friend spent the entire day ripping out my beautiful sidewalk along the south side of the house. I grumbed and growled, despite the fact that I knew it was necessary. See, we have a bit of a foundation issue. We live in a nieghborhod that once housed one of the country’s greatest polluters and, therefore, had the most poisonous ground in all of Denver.

Asarco, a smelting plant, was the reason this neighborhood was built. It was a great job for so many Russian, Polish and (to a much lesser degree) Mexican immigrants that were moving here in the early 1900’s. The land was fairly cheap and, at that time, building your own house wasn’t unheard of. They’d immigrate here, buy a piece of land and live in a shanty until they had the money and necessities to begin building and painting the house with the latest and greatest lead-containing paint on the market. That paint ended up being the least of their worries.

Sometime in the early 90’s, a group of residents banded together and filed suit against Asarco. They took samples of the soil and found exceptionally high levels of arsenic, cadmium and a whole load of stuff you definitely did not want in your vegetables. They won. The first suit of it’s kind ever won by the residents of a neighborhood that had been royally screwed by a big company. They got very little in return, a small bit of money and the replacement of their poisoned dirt. It sent Asarco into bankruptcy - although, not out of business because they’re setting up yet another plant in Houston, so we’ve heard.

So, when they came to replace the soil, they did no grading. They piled the soil in the middle of the yard and there it sat, as a small mountain, leading all the water from rains into the foundation. By the time we moved here, the basement was definitely the worse for wear. The paint is buckled and popping on all four walls but the worst to the south of the house. Eric’s been talking about ripping the sidewalk out to re-grade since we moved in and yesterday the project began.

After ripping out the sidewalk, they realized that A)there was not quite enough available dirt and B)the giant ash tree had decided to grow it’s long and super tough roots on top of the soil instead of underneath. They were going to need a Bobcat. By this time, it was late in the afternoon. They decided to put up the back porch light instead.

Since Eric made it clear that I’m not allowed to mope about it because it will be done, I’m not allowed to whine and complain that I loved that sidewalk and that now my house looks like more of a ghettofied mess than it already did. So, in an effort to be positive about the whole situation, now I have the great beginnings of a moat on the south side and partially along the backside of my house! Woohoo! New housing trend!

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