Solar Power Day 19

Yesterday was the road trip to Battle Creek, Michigan to pick up a giant load of reclaimed Douglas Fir boards. Unfortunately no pictures either since it was too dark for photos once we got there. But it was a semi-eventful day.

Since our only task was to pick up the lumber my project lead and I were supposed to meet later in the afternoon so that he could work on another job site. Due to a little mix-up with the scheduling, instead of picking me up as originally planned and then taking his truck with his personal trailer to the location listed on Craigslist, we ended up taking separate cars since he was on the other side of Grand Rapids at the time. Luckily we managed to get to the address listed in time before they closed since this was actually a business address. But this is where things got interesting.

While we sort of arrived at the right place, we really didn’t. The address we went to was the office location for the business, which was in Hastings, but not the warehouse, located another 45 minutes away in Battle Creek. However the person I contacted through Craigslist was there at the office in Hastings, so we were both really confused. The Douglas Fir boards were actually at the warehouse, which made sense, but the address for the warehouse was never mentioned on Craigslist, nor was it ever communicated to me over the phone by the seller. If you’ve read my previous posts you’ve no doubt picked up on my general disdain for surprises, especially those with a less-than-ideal outcome.

Since we would arrive in Battle Creek well after the warehouse closed, the seller, who was also the office manager, had one of his workers at the warehouse unload it outside one of their loading bays so we could load it up on our own. While it would have been nice to have one of their guys load it up with a forklift since the wood was already on pallets, this was still better than going home empty-handed.

We opted to carpool in the truck at this point, taking my car would be redundant and it needed gas at this point anyway. When we got to the warehouse it only took a minute for us to find the wood piles. Since I couldn’t grab a picture yesterday I’ll upload one in my next post of the wood unloaded in my driveway. It really was a super impressive haul. $250 for easily 300+ board feet of mostly quarter sawn Douglas Fir and it looks like most of the nails have been removed. Yeah I am a very happy camper right now. On a side note, fun fact: this place was actually located less than a mile from one of the Kellogg’s main distribution centers.

Since this was my project lead’s personal trailer he didn’t have to return it to his place of business, allowing him to just leave the trailer hooked up for the night, and then bring the load to my place this morning. More on today’s fun in the next post.