Hello all you Atch’s Place readers!
I had a really neat, once-in-a-lifetime experience this week that you might like hearing about.

I had to go to the Ford Kentucky Truck Plant this week for work. You will never guess what I got to see on Friday, Nov 9th! I was on an active, filming TV show set!

Turns out a family in Louisville was picked for Extreme Makeover – Home Edition and they were doing it when I was there. I sacrificed a couple hours of “driving home time” on Friday to head over and take a look. Wow! That was cool! You can’t even get an idea of how huge one of these home building events is by watching on TV. Incredible. It’s organized, crazed madness. Hundreds of people in a small area and maybe 10 pieces of heavy equipment running all over the place. Ten more machines with operators in them waiting for the “go” signal. It’s wonder none of the workers gets “smooshed”! I was there during demolition, breaking ground for the new house and footer digging. Then I grudgingly left. I could have stayed there all weekend if my better half didn’t have to work on Saturday!

Some highlights (partly for me, as a journal, so I don’t forget some of these details!):

They had a whole block taken over for this. Police had the entire street they live on closed. White tents everywhere, neighbors on all 4 sides were basically taken over and beyond that, every spare square inch of free land in the city block was staging something (heavy equipment, RVs (for the cast I think), storage containers, dumpsters, catering tents, VIP tents, parking, local TV station vans, etc).

They shuttle spectators to and from the site from a vacant Cinema parking lot about a 1/2 mile away. Buses running continuously from 8am to 8pm every day.

When I got there, the house had been knocked down and 3 big bucket cranes were loading it into a steady stream of dumpsters.

As the dumpsters left, a steady stream of dump trucks passed them coming onto the lot dumping fill dirt.

Even before the house was completely gone, they were starting to excavate for the new house. It was going right in front of where the old one was. The machines loading the debris from the demolition were almost colliding with the machines excavating!

In the middle of this chaos, some film crew started wheeling out a big dolly with a camera at the end of a huge arm. Atch, you would have loved this setup. The cameraman could swing the camera around in about a 50 foot diameter circle and from 0 to 20 feet high. All this while he walked in a small 5 foot dia circle with his controls and monitor. Up to this point, I hadn’t seen any of the cast, but then here comes Michael walking up from some tents behind the site (what was once a neighbor’s yard!). Michael is the tall, dark haired designer if you watch the show. He stood right in the excavated area dodging bulldozers, backhoes and cranes while he filmed a segment of the show. That was cool to see. He was talking and waving his arms, but you couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the equipment. Prolly something like, “even as your old house is being taken away behind me, I’m standing here where your brand new home is being started!”. Seems like they did about 4 “takes” before getting out of the way. He waved at everyone and took off to his comfy RV (I’m guessing… maybe he was off to Sears to buy stuff, or designing or something!).

As the old house disappeared and the excavation was almost done, you could see more workers congregating on the other side of the fence near us. Probably about 50 guys and a few gals. As soon as the excavation was done (a nice smooth dirt surface about the size of a LARGE house), a guy yelled “lets go… you 3 grab string, you 5 grab flags, you grab paint, y’all grab steaks…”, etc. They all went nuts and had the footers laid out in about 15 minutes. The head-dude was carrying the plans and you could see the layout of the new house. The footer digging backhoe almost hit the last few getting out of the way and the footer digging process was underway.

As the footers were still being dug, I took off. Nope,… no sign of Ty. They said he was at the University of Louisville filming stuff there. The kid that prompted this makeover goes to school there. Read about it on the builder’s web site if you are interested (linked below).

Elite Homes really did a good job on this web site. Has details and photos as they progress. The whole construction schedule is there, too. The head guy told us that they were about 20 minutes behind schedule as of 2pm yesterday. Think about it… They broke ground at about 1pm Friday while I was there… Certificate of Occupancy is at 10am Tuesday… “Move That Bus” is at 2pm Wednesday!… incredible.
http://eliteextremedream.com/

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Later Y’all!
Tim