While saving money up for my renovation plans I started seeing Debbie Bates. Debbie worked with me at Oshkosh Trailer Company and had divorced her husband of seventeen years the year before. Things got hot and heavy between us and I started staying at her apartment more and more. This left Mark the run of the apartment, garage, outbuildings, and yard.

While still at Oshkosh I had begun hitting the auction houses as well as the government auctions for items to resell. I was getting pretty good at recognizing the items that I could get cheaply and sell at a profit when I made a “slight” mistake on a government auction.
I thought I was bidding on a pallet of computer equipment and was quit happy to win it at $150. However, the “pallet” that I won was part of a 22 pallet lot! Here I am with a Ranger pick up truck and my total day’s auction winnings of 36 pallets of items… I rented a U-haul cube truck and made two trips….Guess where I had to store all that stuff..It filled the living room, and the first bedroom. The look on my brother’s face was priceless. He came to Florida for vacation and ended up helping me move truckloads of computer stuff?

At this point the front of the house became my auction warehouse. For four years I stored all of my selling items from computer and servo equipment to castings, forgings, industrial motors, and transformers there. Accidents happen when moving such heavy items and this was no exception. The end of a gear motor went through the paneling here and a servo controller slide down the pile and through the window there. Pretty soon it looked more like a real warehouse and not a house used for storage.

I made a huge shipment to a customer in Minnesota that pretty much cleared the living room area and a second one to Georgia that did the same for the rear bedroom. I was pretty unhappy with the appearance of what was now revealed.

I decided that I would clean up my “warehouse” and do a better job of keeping things organized in the future. After work I went straight to the house and started cleaning up. The first thing done after moving my remaining inventory was to remove the defunct carpet. It was extremely gross. Oil and grease stains mixed with years of dust made for a dirty, nasty removal. Once removed and cut up in strips I tied them up in rolls and put them out for the trash men. I swept the living room and then swept it again. The wood flooring was patched in places and had areas that the boards had buckled. I rented a wood stripper and leveled the floor as much as possible. (Then swept again)

I washed the walls and replaced the mini blinds and was much happier with the appearance. This little task took me almost two weeks of after-work effort.

It was during this little project that Mark gave me the bad news that the roof was leaking. I called around for roofers to give me an estimate the next day. Two days later I had still not gotten a call back. Apparently my roof leak coincided with the busiest time of the year for roof leaks and my little house was not worth the effort. So I climbed my happy butt up on the roof to check it out. It was pretty obvious what happened once I got up there to inspect it. A tree branch from the neighbors’ tree had gone through the tarpaper running up the side of the false wall during the storm a few days earlier. The gash was a good eighteen inches long by four inches wide. Once I removed the tree branch I could look right into the wall. No wonder it leaked! What a shitty way to make a roof! Well to fix it I had to pull off the roof capping and run more paper material down to the roof and tar it in replacing the roof cap once done. I could not leave it with such a crappy roof and started looking at ways to make it “right”.