Just to refresh your memory, we borrowed (although it doesn't really qualify as borrowing when the arrangement is to pay for it, right?) this bobcat from a work friend of Tom's. Tom dug a giant hole in our driveway with it, and relocated that dirt underneath our house, to raise up the ground level a bit.
And then one of the arms snapped in half.
Which meant that we had to make a claim to our insurer, with whom the excess was a not-small $2,500! That claim process involved finding out just how much it would cost to replace that arm.
Are you sitting down?
$15,000. Yes, fifteen thousand dollars! Thank goodness we're insured! Although that excess still made me want to cry every time I thought about it.
The insurance company sent out an assessor, and that's where things got interesting (just in case you can't consider them interesting yet). He determined that because we hadn't done anything unusual with the machine, it couldn't possibly be our fault that the arm broke. It was the result of a previous
repair very nearby (which you can kind of see in the above photo) that had weakened the arm. So, all we (and by extension, the insurance company) were legally obligated to do was to repair the arm to the kind of state it was in when we received it - i.e. working.
The repair bill was still likely to be about $7,000, so that particular conclusion wasn't really all that comforting, but it did prompt the owner of the bobcat to start thinking about cheaper and easier ways to get the repair done than by getting the insurer to pay for it. And so, very very fortunately for us, he has made an arrangement with his son-in-law who works for a company that has the resources to repair the bobcat, to lend it to them to use for a little while in return for them fixing it so it actually works. Obviously they will need to repair it before they use it.
So, can we have a general HURRAH!!!!! ?
Speaking of its current condition though, there's more to this story.
Unfortunately the angle of the photo doesn't quite show how miserable and forlorn the bobcat has been for the last week or so.
See... the hole that Tom had created in the driveway he managed to partially fill with all of the old concrete stumps from our house (see here), but with the masses of rain we've had lately, our driveway has definitely been more of a pond than an actual effective thoroughfare, as experienced firsthand by our ute, which has been bogged not once, but twice!
After a few days of sunshine, Tom and Daniel worked hard to put all of the original rocks back in our driveway (that Tom had put in a nice pile in our backyard while he dug the original hole in the driveway with the bobcat), to make it a more stable surface to drive over. He then recruited the poor old bobcat to drive over the rocks to make sure they formed a nice solid surface.
That all went well, until he decided to quickly run over the far edge (the lowest edge). And with a spectacular SQUELCH, the Bobcat came to a stop. And there it stayed. Hopelessly lop-sided and hopelessly stuck. For a week.
So we decided to call in the big guns. In other words, we called on our friend who shall be known as "Dodge" to come and rescue us (and the bobcat). He came, armed with only a four-wheel-drive and a snatch-'em strap.
And the bobcat extraction process began.
It involved some towing...
And some chainsawing of obstructive shrubbery...
And some old, bent, gate removal (who knew we had a gate hidden in there?!)...
And then after some more towing, the bobcat was finally out!
And Allie immediately took its place in the driveway. No idea what goes through her mind.
And so end our bobcat adventures. For quite some time, I hope! We booked a truck, and $88 later, it was gone that very same afternoon, and is no longer our responsibility!
Thank goodness! I've never been so glad to see the back of something in my life! Actually, maybe I have been. I've never been so glad to see the back of something in my life, if you don't count that other infamous earthmoving machine that I don't care to remember - the one that refused to work about 80% of the time and magically switched itself on in the middle of the night.
Do you think we should leave the earthmoving to the professionals now?
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