You would not believe how much trash piles up while building a house. We had a couple of huge piles of trash and debris from hanging the drywall and one large pile of scrap wood. After looking into getting a dumpster in the back yard we decided that it wasn’t cost effective. It costs $150 a month for rent, a $150 delivery charge and $250 every time we had it emptied. That added up to $550. Instead, I paid $150 to have a guy park his dump truck in our backyard for a couple of days so we could fill it up with just our trash…no wood allowed.

Unfortunately, no one was around to help fill the truck up, so I had to fill it up myself by breaking all of the drywall into manageable sized pieces (I still remember my hernia surgery) and filled up the truck.


Dump Truck and some of our debris

Once I got to the bottom of the pile and picked up the last big sheet of drywall off of the ground, there were about 30 little centipedes running around and one large one. Centipedes suck. If a centipede bites you, it is very painful and will cause swelling and redness. The symptoms can last as long as 48 hours and can only be temporarily relieved by placing ice cubes directly on the bite (with no power, we have no fridge/freezer…hence no easy access to ice cubes) but you pretty much just need to deal with it. I killed the big one with the closest long object I could find…a sledge hammer (i was afraid to step on it because it was longer than my foot and i didn’t want it to curl up and bite my ankle).


Big Dead Centipede next to the Sledge Hammer that killed it