I have never seen or experienced a construction project that goes exactly the way you plan for. Today at Magnolia Community Garden was no exception. A simple task: replacing the wood foundation of a rebar trellis that had started to rot. In layman’s terms, we needed to replace 8 pieces of 2×4. Sounds simple enough, right?
We arrived, hammers blazing, thinking it would be a simple removal of the old and installation of the new. We didn’t take into account that when metal rusts, the rust acts as another layer or I guess more accurately glue. The rebar for most of the trellises was so embedded into the wood that not even a metal sledgehammer could get the rebar to budge. So what’s the next step? What do you do?
David Pastre’s solution was to take the sledgehammer and go full force on the rotting wood base. And for 5 out of the 8 pieces of wood, that worked. Until… The hammer split into two pieces! Even though we were down one hammer, we were still able to install and put back together the first 5 trellises. And I am happy to report: No plants were harmed in the making of this project!