Comments on: Something Light: Destructo tots

By: mumsee

mumsee — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 04:52:59 +0000

Pauline,

I know, I am just continually amazed at the cost of things. We were very fortunate with our purchase but sadly the foreowners weren’t as it was a foreclosure. We do believe God had a plan when He put us here and believe it is being played out with kids we could not otherwise imagine being able to take in. Then when people talk about the loss of some walls and fixtures and cars and personal property at two hundred thousand just after Michelle was lamenting having to sell at a loss of so much more than my whole house. I guess I am just amazed that anybody can afford to live anywhere! We are pricing ourselves out of life. But God still reigns.

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By: Pauline

Pauline — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 04:19:40 +0000

Mumsee,
Depending where one lives, it doesn’t take an extravagant lifestyle for one’s property to be worth over one hundred thousand dollars. We might have been able to get a house for a bit less if we took one without a basement, but having grown up in “tornado alley” in Nebraska, a basement has always been a priority for my husband. (And a tornado did come through town last summer, though it missed our neighborhood.)

We discovered, when getting homeowners insurance in Michigan (where our previous house was), that replacement cost is considerably higher than appraised cost. I don’t really understand why (they talked about the difficulties of replacing the foundation if it were damaged), but all the insurance companies seem to price it that way. I guess it’s sort of like getting body work on a car – to fix a severely damaged body costs more than a new car, because it’s easier to start from scratch than repair that much damage.

So if our property were a total loss (including vehicles and possessions), I would guess that it could run a couple hundred thousand.

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By: mumsee

mumsee — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:38:23 +0000

KRM,

Now see? That is one of the blessings of my lifestlye. Even if total destruction should happen I can not even imagine it would be one hundred thousand dollars, okay not even ninety thousand, okay eighty… you people speak in numbers bigger than I can fathom.

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By: krm

krm — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:24:41 +0000

The house behind my M-I-L had one of those “teenagers threw a raucus party in a house while the owners were vacationing” events – a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of damages (all of the wall and fixtures, the cars in the garage, virtually all of the personal property).

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By: WW

WW — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:51:23 +0000

Not really my doing, but I was “involved”.

Last year I took my father-in-law’s 1972 Ford LTD in to get the wiring for the trailer hitch replaced. It is a very BIG, old, heavy duty car.

The mechanic started to move the car to the shop and promptly backed it into the side of the newish SUV that had just parked behind it, right in front of all us waiting customers. Upon hearing the reaction of the young woman next to me, I said, “I think my car just ran into your car without us. What do we do now?”

Since it was the mechanic’s fault the company/mechanic dealt with the fairly significant damage, like dents a couple inches deep, to the SUV. We couldn’t find a new dent in the LTD, so they just waved all the labor fees on the wiring job for me instead of having to report two damaged cars to their insurance company.

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By: Peter L

Peter L — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:58:29 +0000

I remember my freshman year in high school I had a welding class. I was practicing arc welding and accidentally welded the piece of metal to the grating. The teacher was mad. He said I would have gotten an A since it was such a good weld, but he had to cut the grating apart to get the metal off!

My dad tells of a time when a neighbor boy of his in the Bronx NYC dropped a lit match down a car gas tank to see what would happen. Another time, one of them put a potato in the exhaust pipe of a car just to watch it launch when the engine started.

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By: Cheryl D.

Cheryl D. — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:13:23 +0000

I grew up in Phoenix. Annual rainfall six inches. My sister got a book from the school library called One Day It Rained Cats and Dogs. I don’t remember the reason we wanted to look at it outside, but we did. Then she left it outside, and that night it rained cats and dogs. My sister quietly returned the library book in the book return slot, hoping no one would notice, but somehow the librarian did notice. Mom paid for half of the book, my sister the other half.

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By: Kathy

Kathy — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:28:37 +0000

Yes, I know, it’s supposed to be about kids but when you don’t have any–well you know. Sorry, I can’t resist telling this one about my dog. She was a Border Collie. Lots of energy. She ran through the dining room and caught both the power cord and the foot pedal cord to my sewing machine. The machine didn’t fall on the floor. It flew about three feet. Although it was smashed to pieces, we took it to the sewing machine store (now the good part!) My husband saw the computerized sewing/embroidery machines and bought me one! So thanks to the dog, I went from a low end to a high end machine.

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By: Pauline

Pauline — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:15:12 +0000

The only thing I remember being somewhat responsible for breaking was the plastic side of a fluorescent light fixture in my third grade classroom. I had a superball that I enjoyed playing with at home, and I had brought it to school because it was a rainy day and I thought it would be more fun to play with for indoors recess than whatever stuff was in the classroom. I was careful with it myself, but one of my classmates was less careful, and it hit and broke a piece off the light fixture. I suppose it was pretty small potatoes compared to some of the stories here, but I had never damaged public property in my life and I was horrified. The teacher blamed me, because it was my ball, and I was sure she was going to call my parents and tell what a terrible thing I had done. I remember I dreaded walking home that day.

Apparently she never called them, or told them a thing about it, because they never mentioned it. The light fixture got fixed, and probably everyone in the world has forgotten about it except me. I never took another toy to school, and I never liked superballs quite as well afterward.

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By: Make it Man

Make it Man — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:36:46 +0000

When I was a mechanic, I once let a boss borrow a drill bit. When it was returned a good 1/2 inch of it was ruined. Rather than grind it all the way down to the good profile which would have taken a good bit of time, I ground a deep groove around the spot where I wanted it to break off. Then I proceeded to fasten it in the vice, and pop the end off with a hammer. The end went flying and promptly broke out the driver’s side window of the car I was working on… There went a good chunk of that days paycheck…

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