We received a small mountain of EPS foam for our shallow frost-protected slabs today, and getting it home was a bit of a fiasco. Our shipment was supposed to arrive on a box truck, but instead, it came on a seventy-foot-long semi. Tyler did his best to convince the delivery driver to bring his gargantuan rig through the hinterland roads that lead to our property, but the man wasn't keen.
And so, rather than unloading the shipment the bottom of our driveway as we'd hoped, we met at a highway pull-off about five miles away. Apparently there was some miscommunication with dispatch—the resulting "shit sandwich", as our driver Stephen put it, was both his and ours to eat. Together, we set about unloading three enormous pallets of foam from his truck, one sheet at a time:
Some of it went on the side of the road:
...and some of it went right onto our truck and trailer. While we were stacking, Tyler and I had flashbacks of being in Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, they'd probably laugh at our amateur loading!
When we were through with one round of stacking, Tyler drove off to unload the sheets at home by himself, while Stephen and I kept moving more foam out of the semi. Eventually, Tyler returned to the scene with an empty pickup and trailer, and we repeated the whole process anew. When all of the foam was out of the semi, Stephen bade us farewell, leaving me to guard the remaining pile of insulation on my own.
As I sat and waited, surveying the dark clouds overhead, I decided that if it started raining, I'd build myself a little foam fort by the side of the road for shelter. I never needed to, but the thought made me smile.
A few hours later, we finally hoisted the last few sheets of the stuff into the trailer, and drove back to our land together. Up our mud-pit of a road we went, until we reached our clearing, and I was able to see Tyler's handiwork: right by our compost bins (oh the irony!) was a mountain of foam. As we stacked the final pieces, rain began to fall.
To be perfectly honest, this excursion was the last thing I wanted to do on a cold, grey day, but in the end, it was pretty fun. I had some nice chats with our friendly driver about life and travel and his fascinating family history, and I got to go inside of a semi trailer for the first time ever. Best of all, aside from the concrete itself, we now have everything we need to pour our foundations!