Hard physical labor...

Hard physical labor...  That's something I'm not used to :)  But ... I own a 20' x 60' steel building kit (story on that below), and it's not going to Utah with us.  The kit consists of a few thousand parts, including over one hundred formed steel panels, and it weighs nearly 4 tons altogether.  So I built a stand to display it nicely, and now I'm in the process of moving it from it's previous storage place, way out in the back of our yard, to the stand near our front gate.  Picture me – this terribly out-of-shape grey-bearded nerd, loading between a half ton and a ton of steel at a time onto the front of my tractor, then unloading it onto the stand.  Yikes!  I'm about a third done right now, and I'm feeling it in every muscle.  Probably by tomorrow evening I'll have it all nicely on display, and then I'll officially list it for sale.  I paid just over $12,000 for it ten years ago, and it looks like the prices haven't changed much...

The story behind that steel building kit: in 2004, just after the 2003 fires burned within a mile of our home, we decided to put up some fireproof storage.  What better than a steel building for fireproof?  So I cut-and-filled a pad in our back yard for a 20' x 60' building, and bought the kit.  Not long after the kit was delivered, and completely by coincidence, Debbie and I took a drive out to the end of Montiel Truck Trail, one of the areas that was devastated by those fires.  While we were driving around, I noticed that there was some wreckage of steel buildings visible.  I looked a little closer – and discovered that all the steel buildings had collapsed.  Every. Single. One. Of. Them.  What happened?  Well, it turns out that it's the same exact phenomenon that caused the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Steel gets much weaker when heated by fire.  And these steel buildings aren't designed to be strong enough to stay standing when they are heated.  Later I talked with a fireman, and he told me that they really disliked the steel buildings, precisely because they were so prone to collapsing – and without much warning, either.

So we shelved the plans for that building.  Naturally, it wasn't returnable :)  And now I have a beautiful 1200 sq. ft. building kit available for someone who wants the work or storage space, or a barn, and who wasn't expecting it to be fireproof...