Our house has a beautiful and large back yard. When I moved in, one of the first things that I noticed was the odd placement of the laundry line. For starters, it runs north-south meaning that the laundry gets mostly morning or afternoon sun. The worse, and truly baffling thing about the position of the laundry line, is that it perfectly bisects the yard. This makes the yard look smaller and also cuts up the usable space for things like tossing a disc. For about a year I considered taking it out and I finally got around to doing it.
As I assumed, the post was embedded in a chunk of concrete. All I had to do was dig it up. So I started digging. The plan was to dig out the post that was in the middle of the yard and swing it 90° and re-bury it so that the laundry line ran along the fence instead of straight through the middle of the yard.
It turned out to be a very sizable chunk of concrete that it was buried in, but I figured that if I got it mostly uncovered on one side, I should be able to tug it out by pushing or pulling the post.
Now that I had the concrete block partially uncovered, I wanted to try just tugging on the post to leverage the whole thing out. I enjoyed this small part of this project because I got to use two of my favorite knots; the clove hitch, and the butterfly knot. I took my static rope (8,000 lbs breaking strength, <2% stretch) and attached it to the top of the post to be removed and to the bottom of the fixed post - both with clove hitches.
I used some carabiners to set up a 6:1 pulley system so I could really yank on the post. I pulled and I pulled and all that happened was that this 4" thick steel post started to bend. So I dug out a bunch more and tried again, but still got nothing.
Finally we decided that the only thing left to do was to cut off the post and bury the concrete block. We never found the bottom of that block of concrete and can only assume that it is contiguous with the foundation of the house. The only problem now was that it would only be a few inches below the surface of the lawn and that made me a little uncomfortable, so I decided to try to bust up the block with a sledge hammer. This turned out to be somewhat difficult as well, but after pounding away at it for about 3 hours a day for a week, I got it down about 5 inches. I cut off the remaining chunk of the post and called it good. In addition to a lot of sweat on my part, this project cost me the handle of the sledge hammer I was borrowing from my land lord. You can look forward to a post about that repair.
I used some carabiners to set up a 6:1 pulley system so I could really yank on the post. I pulled and I pulled and all that happened was that this 4" thick steel post started to bend. So I dug out a bunch more and tried again, but still got nothing.
Finally we decided that the only thing left to do was to cut off the post and bury the concrete block. We never found the bottom of that block of concrete and can only assume that it is contiguous with the foundation of the house. The only problem now was that it would only be a few inches below the surface of the lawn and that made me a little uncomfortable, so I decided to try to bust up the block with a sledge hammer. This turned out to be somewhat difficult as well, but after pounding away at it for about 3 hours a day for a week, I got it down about 5 inches. I cut off the remaining chunk of the post and called it good. In addition to a lot of sweat on my part, this project cost me the handle of the sledge hammer I was borrowing from my land lord. You can look forward to a post about that repair.
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