Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 16:05:39 -0800
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: natasha!mholser@Adobe.COM
Subject: More Big Buses (funny cargo)
About five years ago we built a house. We wanted tile floors in the laundry
room and kitchen, but the builder was balking (and wanting to charge a
fortune!) Seems he was having trouble with the tile subcontractor.
Well I went down to the local tile store in San Jose (American Olean, BTW)
to check into some tile. There in front of the store they have a bunch of
tile sitting on pallets. Nine cents a square foot. Really. "What's the
story?" asks I.
The story is that this is a custom order (real expensive custom order, too,
it was $15 per square foot stuff) for a new restraunt in Santa Cruz. Seems
the building was one of thoise that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake
and insurance covered the tile, but nobody really wanted it anymore. They
were trying to recover their storage costs of about $200.
Well, this was just what I was looking for, and under my budget, too, and I
didn't care that it didn't match any other tile color. So I bought it. The
whole lot. 2000 square feet of tile...
I went to home to get my old VW singlecab.
You know how $#$%^%$ heavy tile is? I didn't at the time (this is also
full vitreous tile -- really heavy stuff). Each little bitty box was
1 foot by 2 feet by about 2 inches, and weighed 70 pounds. They looked
at my VW and shrugged. I folded down the side. They picked up a
pallet and dropped it into the bed. Creak. Groan. Well, at least the
tires didn't pop. I drove to our rental house in San Jose *real* carefully
and got really sore moving tile off a box at a time.
Went back for the second pallet.
I figured that each load was close to two tons. Wow.
The next hurdle: The new house was 180 miles away, near Yosemite. Up and
over the Pacheco pass. Four trips, a ton each. And that old '57 VW
faithfully moved it all...
We tiled much of the house, but still have never gotten around to tiling
the three-car garage, or the workshop, or the patios -- we still have
several tons of tile. Sitting next to the big pile of VW parts...
malcolm
