Today I discovered that 7 buckets of manure in the back with 3 buckets riding shotgun and 2 buckets of gravel on the floor board is about the load limit for the new home made golf cart dump box.

I can't believe it took us this long to make such an obvious improvement in carrying capacity.

 

Total cost on this home made golf cart dump box was just over 5 bucks thanks to using scrap wood from the old house.

It expands the back hauling capacity of the golf cart from 2 buckets to 7, with about 3 buckets worth in between the cracks.

Next up is a wooden rack to take advantage of some space up front.

 

Dropped off the rental chipper bright and early today in Kingsport which happens to be down the road from the Mulch store.

We bought 2 cubic yards of double ground, slightly aged mulch for 48 bucks.

Anna got a bit weak in the knees from her first handful and sniff not unlike the reaction you see when a wine expert gets his or her hands on a glass of 1943 Chateau Picard.

Wood chips make me chipper.  What can I say --- some women like roses, but I like mulch, even if it won't be properly aged until several months from now.

We spent most of the day Saturday over at our neighbors' helping them chip the biggest pile of saplings I've ever seen.  Sunday afternoon it was our turn.  One neighbor drove the chipper over to our place with his amazingly huge tractor, and then we chipped up a storm for about four hours before giving in to exhaustion.

Despite being pleased as punch about our wood chips, I have to admit that I think the chipper rental won't be an experiment we'll be repeating.  Once I put on my wrist braces, my carpal tunnel simmered down, but it was still an awfully wearing weekend for about as many chips as we could get for free if we hunt down the utility line guys.  Add in a few hours drive to pick up and drop off the chipper, and we might have been just as well off to buy mulch.

On the other hand, we did clear up some brushy edges that needed work, and I have my wood chip piles segregated into partially decomposed (for mulching with this year), fresh pine (for mulching the blueberries next year), and fresh box-elder (for planting mushrooms in.)  The control freak in me is well pleased.  And, look, the year's first crocus!!

This short video provides an accurate yet boring picture of how the rental chipper cuts a rug.

Our share ended up being 1/3 of the weekend time which worked out to be 65 dollars.

It was a great opportunity that would not have been possible without our neighbors' suggestion of sharing the time and the aid of their tractor to pull the thing all the way back here. Well worth waking up early tomorrow morning to drive it back to it's home in the big city.

I imagine this might be the closest thing we have to participating in an old fashioned barn raising which is too bad because this neighborly cooperation thing is a pretty darn good feeling at the end of the day.

 

We decided to make the new home made brood coop big enough to handle the little styrofoam incubator for future chick operations.


The trick will be to monitor the temperature over the weekend to see if any adjustments need to be made.

I used a few scrap pieces of 2x4 to secure up each corner, which worked nicely as a support for both Avian Aqua Misers.

 

There's a really good wiki-how that sums up what you need to know about sharpening your chainsaw with a hand file.

It seems the experts suggest a machine grinding at a shop after every 5 hand sharpening episodes.

You can buy small attachments for a Dremel to make the job easier, but these little hand files are a lot cheaper.

 

    Each round of gravel shoveling yields a few improvements on our technique.

 

I got this cedar tree notched and ready to come down when a feeling came over me that it might still fall the other way, which would take down one of the power lines and leave us in the dark.

Nothing our little 4 ton hand winch can't handle. We just used the ladder to secure a cable high up on the tree in question, secured the other end to another tree and cranked it in a way that left it no choice but to fall away from the electricity.

 

We finished up the new oyster mushroom logs today and carefully moved the old logs to the new station. This time we're using two rows of metal pipe to keep the logs off the ground, which helps to keep out unwanted fungus that's not as edible.

Credit goes to Chest of Books.com for the lovely image next to our picture.

 

I upgraded the beer can from last year's wax melting kit with this bigger and stronger tin can. I also improved the heating process by using a hot water bath as seen in the photo. This allowed for much better control and a safer place to rest the can while we drilled the next round of holes for the new oyster mushroom logs.

 

Just flipping your mushroom log soaking pool over is not enough to winterize it. This one was crushed by the weight of falling snow during the blizzard of 2009. Next year we'll hang it up somewhere in the barn.

 

Project oyster mushroom logs step 1. Cut down small, fresh, box elder trees to be carried to the new soaking station.

 

It was a good day to take advantage of the nice weather and do some driveway repair.

Push with the rake, shovel, rake some more and repeat several times.

 

We decided to go with these peel off and stick linoleum pieces for the floor of the home made storage building. They turned out to be a cheaper option compared to getting a roll of the stuff and I'm thinking a bit easier for amateurs like us. It was a smooth operation and we had most of it done before we knew what hit us.

Hey you two...what's your secret to a smooth working team?
George W-Texas
 

Thanks for the question George. It's really hard to pin down just one thing that makes two people work well together. We try to figure out which task is best suited for our skill set. For example. Anna is really good with math, so she is in charge of measuring for this project. I've got a little more upper body strength so I usually do most of the heavy lifting.

Last but not least you should both agree on a time to stop working. A sure way to create extra friction is to have one person thinking it's 10 minutes till the end of the day and the other wanting to push through till sunset. Anna and I usually wind down around 4pm and shift into an evening chore routine.

Holding up the plywood for the ceiling is a challenge to say the least.

I eventually adopted a technique of using the upper portion of my arm along with the top of my head to hold each piece in place.


I knew having a hard head would come in handy one of these days and that day was today.

The couple that works together, stays together...or pitches a huge hissy fit and gets a divorce.  Mark and I don't celebrate Valentine's Day, but we do spend every day living in each others' pockets, usually very amicably.  In fact, one of my favorite parts of the day is the time I spend working on a project with Mark.

Even though I grew up with a handy father, I somehow missed most of the lessons on basic tool-use.  So Mark has taught me how to use a power drill, a miter saw, and so forth.  Monday, I was putting up the last bit of wall paneling, this time around the newly re-wired electric outlets.  How, I wondered, does one cut a small rectangle out of a piece of plywood with a jig saw?

I know this is old hat to those of you who dabble (or work) in construction, but I found this technique elegant and captivating.  First, Mark used a drill to start a hole in the plywood.  Then he cut along the line, curving around each corner so that he could keep cutting until an oval section fell out.  Third, he went back and cut the corners out --- the pictures hopefully make this process clearer than my description.  It's always a good day when I learn something new!

I would like to express some appreciation here for all the comments lately, especially the tips given for the home made door frame.

I thought adding another stop plate to the hinge side was a great idea and jumped on it today while at the same time deleting the L bracket, which is no longer needed since the liquid nails has finished curing.

Would I build another door frame from scratch in the future? Yeah...it wasn't all that bad and the finished product will meet our needs for years to come.

The hinge area of the home made door frame ended up with a small gap even though I chisled out enough wood for the hinge to be flush with the frame.

A medium sized strip of stick-on foam was enough to seal most of the space.

Making a door frame from scratch wasn't as hard as I thought it might be, but I can already see how much time a fabricated frame would save, especially if you're trying to make it look perfect.

 

The home made door frame stopping plate gets most of its firmness from this bottom corner bracket. I chisled out about a 1/4 of an inch of the floor to compensate for the depth of the bracket. This is done to avoid a bulge in the future linolem floor.

With Mark on the job, our second round of plywood hauling went much more smoothly than the first.  While I was finishing up the inside walls of the homemade storage building, he wandered off to the barn and rigged a holder out of discarded boards within half an hour.  If I hadn't overloaded it ("Surely twelve boards won't be too many to carry between us!"), it would have been perfect, but as it was we barely made it two thirds of the way home.  Luckily, that's where dry ground begins, so Mark was able to go get the golf cart and drive our load back to the building.

Meanwhile, I hauled in some more insulation using the old hoe trick.  You stick the handle of the hoe through the plastic wrapper of two rolls of insulation, pushing one roll all the way back to the hoe blade so that your head has room to sit between the two rolls.  Stuff some discarded underwear* under your coat as a shoulder pad, and it's pretty simple to carry the insulation home.  Now we're all set to start on the ceiling next week!

* "Is that men's underwear sticking out of your jacket pocket?" Mark asked in disbelief as I set out.

 

The downside to fabricating a door frame with a stopping plate is allowing for enough room for your hand to grip the knob without banging it against the frame when you pull it closed.

I decided to solve this problem with a small section of a rubber door sweep. It blocks the gap nicely while providing a smooth and soft surface for any close calls that might happen.

Somewhere in the middle of the morning Thursday, the homemade storage building began to feel like inside rather than outside.  I could tell because Mark went outside, leaving the door ajar, and I came along behind him and closed the door to keep the room warm.

And it was warm inside.  Despite being snowy and barely above freezing outside, once Mark fired up the wood stove, the building heated up surprisingly fast.  We don't even have the insulation up in the ceiling yet, but within an hour we were shedding our coats and working in our indoors clothes.  I guess we've been losing a lot of heat from our exterior wood stove to the outside!

I wonder if, rather than saving up for an efficient wood stove, we should instead make another small building and install two small wood stoves, relegating the trailer to summer use.  Not this year, though!  The garden is already starting to pull at my brain, begging me to finish up winter chores and start the pruning.

(The photos above show what I've been up to while Mark was putting in the door --- covering the walls with a nice, smooth plywood.  I find myself getting lost in the swirls of the wood grain.)

 

The do it yourself storage building now has a door up thanks to a couple more smashed brackets that work great at keeping the stopping portion of the frame in place.

 

We forgot to use a level when we were setting up the outer door frame of the storage building and because of that a small gap needed to be added towards the top to level it out.

 

We've had a really good test for the storage building roof today thanks to a steady stream of rain. No leaks so far while we begin the process of measuring, cutting, and installing the plywood that Anna worked so hard to bring in yesterday.

As you've probably gathered by now, we don't live next to the road.  A third of a mile of floodplain lies between our trailer and our car parking area, and during this abnormally wet winter that means a third of a mile of mud.

It's been weeks since the ground has been dry enough for the golf cart to traverse our swamp, but we went ahead and bought a vanful of building supplies last week to finish up the homemade storage building.  Since insulation is, by definition, light and airy, we didn't have a problem hauling in enough to finish the walls.  But the sheets of plywood we plan to cover the interior with were another matter.  Mark wisely asked at the store to have the four by eight panels cut in half, but even a four by four sheet of plywood is extremely ungainly.  I set out on Monday to see how many sheets I could haul through the mud to move our project along.

Attempt 1 began with me hoisting four sheets onto my head.  By the time I crossed the creek, I knew this method wasn't going to work.  Luckily, I ran into the heavy hauler halfway home, lashed the plywood down, and marveled over how wheels made the work lighter.  Elapsed time: 1 hour.  Sheets per hour: 4.

My major physical weakness is carpal tunnel, and I knew that I couldn't pull the heavy hauler through the mud again without waking up the next night with tingling hands.  So for attempt 2, I got out my hiking backpack and some rope.  Out at the van, I lashed four sheets onto the backpack and manhandled it onto my back.  The boards felt positively light, but they also went a bit akilter and I had to constantly push them back into place.  Elapsed time: 40 minutes.  Sheets per hour: 6.

For attempt 3, I got smart and stupid all at once.  First the smart part.  I realized that the pea trellis material would make a perfect sling to hold the wood together, making it easy to tie it onto my backpack.  The whole thing seemed so easy, in fact, that I got greedy and decided to haul in six sheets instead of four.  Bad idea!  By the time I sloshed through the mud and made it home, I was worn out!  Elapsed time: 50 minutes.  Sheets per hour: 7 --- but that doesn't count the hour I spent collapsed on the couch afterwards!

At least we have some wood to work with, now.  Mark has plans to fix up the driveway, which may make all of this muddy hauling a thing of the past.  More on that later....

What do you do if you want to install an automatic chicken coop door but you don't have electricity running to your coop?

Chicken coop door.com has recently come out with a new solar powered option that will save you the chore of letting your girls out in the morning and remembering to lock them back up at night.

The price is 324 dollars and maybe worth it if you don't have the skill and time to build an automatic chicken coop door yourself.

Our homemade storage building continues to be a learning experience.  When we started out, I blithely said, "Let's put in as much insulation as possible despite the cost," and Mark agreed.  What I didn't realize is that you have to plan for your insulation needs from the get-go.

The map and chart at the top of the page show EPA's insulation recommendations for new wood-framed homes when heating with gas, heat pumps, or fuel oil.  (They recommend more insulation if you heat with electricity, and don't even give you an option for heating with wood.)  We're in their zone 4, which means we should have at least R30 in our ceiling and R13 in our walls.  The latter is easy, but the former is a bit of an issue.

Assuming you're using fiberglass insulation (which fits our wallet and our remote setting), you need thicker wall or ceiling cavities to fit more insulation.  A typical 2X4 wall will hold up to R15 --- if you try to cram R19 in, you compress the insulation and, I believe, actually get less insulative value than you would have with a lower rated batt of insulation.

Our original rafters are 5.5 inches deep, which would only allow us to put in R19 insulation up there --- makes me chilly just thinking about it (although I think the trailer ceiling has about R13.)  So we extended our rafters with some two by fours, giving us the space to increase our ceiling insulation to R30.  For future reference, here is the cavity depth you need for some common insulation r-values:

• 3.5 inches --- R13
• 6 inches --- R19
• 9 inches --- R30
• 12 inches --- R38

Most of our building project has been very forgiving of my learn-as-we-go mentality, but insulation requires some forethought.  For those who might want to try their own hand at building --- shun the fault I fell in!

Little house in the suburbs dot com is hands down the coldest automatic chicken waterer I've seen so far.

I can't prove it, but I feel like all chickens can appreciate the simple comfort of a cool drink on a hot summer day.

We've got side by side Avian Aqua Misers and one day last summer I put a handfull of ice in one of them and noticed how our Plymouth Rock hens favored the colder water.

I know it's not a scientific test, but maybe I can expand the parameters next summer to see if there's any truth to this crazy hypothesis?

 

The home made storage building got about half way sealed today thanks to four tubes of caulk and five tubes of liquid nails.

My mindset already seems to be taking in the permaculture mantra "one man's trash is my treasure."

All through our building project, I've been letting the sawdust slip into the mud and disappear, but this week I suddenly realized it was a gold mine!  I swept up about half a gallon and wish the wood-cutting part of the project wasn't nearly over.

Shall I use my precious sawdust for making bricks for a rocket stove or for mixing with wood chips to provide our mushroom spawn a better substrate?  Choices, choices!

 

We had a box of these corner brackets that flattened out nicely with a few bangs of a hammer. Extending the rafters will allow us to squeeze in some extra insulation.

 

The home made storage building is pretty much sealed up in the upper rafter section thanks to several rounds of cutting salvaged wood to size and securing it in place.

 

Another winter day at Wetknee where the snow is taking its sweet time saying goodbye.

 

The home made storage building passed its first heavy snow test...yes, I know, 6 inches doesn't count as heavy for some of you out there, but it was heavy enough to dominate the small talk in both the Dollar store and the Post Office around here during the days leading up to this latest visit by Jack Frost.

We've decided to wait on putting the tin around the skylight until we're forecast to have some sustained warm weather, but otherwise the homemade storage building is under roof and enclosed to the same level as the pre-made buildings you can buy at Lowes.  Of course, we've still got a lot of work to do --- painting the exterior,  adding gutters, sealing cracks, adding insulation, throwing some linoleum on the floor, and finishing the interior walls.  But I thought now would be a good time to crunch the numbers and see whether it was smart to build the structure ourselves rather than buying one pre-made.

Our building is 8 feet by 20 feet (with the last four feet on the long side being a raised loft.)  The total cost in supplies has been $1,063.39, or $6.65 per square foot. We could have gotten a metal shed from Home Depot for a similar price per square foot, but it would have only been six feet tall (which would have bumped Mark's head!)  A similar sized wooden shed on the lot at Lowes (with more adequate head room) costs three times as much, is constructed out of two by twos instead of two by fours, and only has one small window.  I think we got a good deal --- plus we learned an awful lot about building in the process!

We ended up with several small gaps once everything went together with the salvaged wood for the storage building project. I was a little apprehensive about using liquid nails yesterday because I knew it was predicted to get colder today, but it looks to be setting up just fine.

Like every part of our homemade storage building project, the roof was a learning experience.  We chose to reuse salvaged tin from the old house we tore down, and I wish I'd taken the time during demolition to mark the order in which the sheets of tin came off the roof.  Instead, we ended up with a mixture of pieces of tin from different parts of the roof, and when we put them up on the new roof, the holes in the overlapping ridges didn't line up from one piece to the other.  It wasn't too hard to make a pilot hole in the bottom piece of tin with a nail then fit in the roofing screw, but extra holes in your roof are never a good thing.

Learning experience two was all about lining up the tin.  Our building isn't quite square, and I decided to line up the long side of the tin with the short edge of the building and let the short side of the tin be not quite parallel with the long edge of the building.  Mistake!  By piece of tin number three, it was clear that my tin was no longer going to cover the top wooden cross-piece unless I gave in and tugged it up a bit.  I ended up with a roof with slightly jaggedy top and bottom edges rather than straight lines across.  Hopefully when we add the gutter, the jaggediness will be less visible.

Mark kindly didn't comment on my roofing inadequacies....  Thanks, honey!

 

Blue skies, sun shine, and finishing most of the roof. Another great day of progress for the do it yourself storage building.

For those of you who aren't following the cheap creek-crossing options discussion, I thought I'd showcase some of the interesting ideas our readers have suggested to get us across the creek.  Mom posted a cool video of a road-sized drawbridge in action, to which Roland responded with this image of a pedestrian-scale drawbridge.  Roland commented to let us know that these are quite common in the Netherlands --- who knew?!




This video of a really cheaply constructed rope swinging bridge also tickled my fancy.  Swinging bridges are quite common in our area, which suggests they might be one of the best options.  I'd thought they were beyond our price-range, but they might be feasible using rope and two by fours.



Roland, again, peaked my curiosity with his note that the Incas have been making grass rope bridges for centuries.  Isn't the one shown here awesome?  (No, we won't be weaving straw ropes --- I just think it's cool.)

Meanwhile, Dudley suggested two quick and dirty (and cheap) options --- using a junked flatbed tractor trailer, or using a ladder as the supports for wooden planks.  The former reminded me of the idea Mark had floated a while ago about using the frame of a burned down mobile home.

Daddy and Erich suggested using telephone poles as the supports for a footbridge --- this may indeed be our cheapest and easiest option, if we found used telephone poles and were able to haul them.

A couple of you have suggested pontoon bridges, but these don't seem very feasible for our creek --- the water goes up and down too fast, I think, and floating trees would be a problem.

Daddy let me know that my stepping stone option isn't nuts since he'd been to a park that used three foot high piers as stepping stones along a trail.

Finally, two of you drew up bridge plans for us!  The drawing on the left is Titus's plan, using the existing telephone poles on each side of the creek as anchors.  It depends on I-beams for support.  The drawing below is Roland's tensegrity bridge.  (I'd never heard of it either!  Check out his comment for more info.)

I don't think we're any closer to making a design decision, but we sure have enjoyed seeing all of these ideas.  Keep them coming!

 

Note to any future homesteading men out there. If you find a woman that will do your roofing without too much complaining then you've found a mate. Treat her well and don't work her too hard.

Why, you ask, are we out cutting wood when we're trying to hurry up and finish our homemade storage building?  Well, Monday it poured all day and the creek went up, so when we headed out to work on Tuesday, we were chagrined to discover that the screws we'd bought last weekend were on the other side of a raging flood.  Then we started pondering how to seal in the skylight over Mark's loft in the new roof, and realized that none of the roof sealants are going to dry properly at temperatures hovering around freezing.

And, of course, there's the siren song of mulch.  We got in touch with one of our neighbors this weekend and have decided to go in on renting an industrial chipper one weekend soon.  (At a lot of the rental places, you can take a piece of equipment home on Saturday morning and not have to return it until Monday morning for the price of a single day since they're closed on Sunday.)  We want to get the most bang for our buck, so that means consolidating all of the brush into a few big piles for easy access.

My mouth starts watering every time I think of the chipper, and I keep having to remind myself not to count my chickens before they hatch.  But every brush pile is already earmarked for a project.  We've got two big piles of pine limbs that I figure will make an awesome, acidifying mulch on our blueberries, and a pile of freshly cut and fallen branches that will make a great substrate for the King Stropharia spawn we plan to order in a few weeks.  Then there are the three year old brush piles that we originally planned to burn like our neighbors do, but instead decided to let rot down --- I figure that these will turn into instant, semi-composted mulch to go straight on perennials.  Hopefully, we'll have a few more afternoons to build our brush piles before the chipper comes through.

Carolyn Roberts from house of straw.com has made a fun and informative 8 minute video that takes you through all the hoops she had to jump through to make her straw bale dream a reality. What sets this collection of information apart from others I've come across is the level of detail she shares when it comes to building codes and materials.

We considered the straw bale approach briefly, but decided against it for multiple reasons, mainly the fact that we get a lot of moisture around here, and it's not really as cheap as you might think.  Carolyn spent 50 thousand dollars and a good chunk of her precious time to finish the above home, which was way out of our price range and would have delayed our garden infrastructure building considerably. Her Walden castle is hands down more beautiful and efficient than our recycled trailer, but we would have had to go in debt to attain that level of comfort, an option that shouldn't even be on the table for anyone who prefers time over money, which goes to the very core essence of what the Walden Effect is all about.

These modified brackets help to illustrate the "use what you've got" building philosophy we've been trying to adopt for this home made storage building project.

Several of you have expressed an interest in Farm Goal '10's "Revisit the creek crossing."  I'm always interested to see what clever ideas people come up with, especially while we're in the planning stages.  (We'll be in the planning stages for another couple of months until the water warms up.)  So here's some extra info to get those creative juices flowing.

The drawing here is a top view of the creek crossing area.  As you can see, the creek is relatively shallow a lot of the time, but regularly rises to 16 to 20 inches after normal rains.  About once a month, it rises to the top of (and over) its approximately five foot high banks, at which point it washes away anything that isn't securely bolted down.

Creek crossing 1.0 is a cinderblock ford that still works perfectly for its purpose --- getting vehicles across the creek when the water is no more than two feet high.  However, we really only drive across the creek a few times a month.  This year's priority refers to the much more frequent times that we walk across.  Just so you know, we don't want a big, fancy bridge to drive across --- we like our moat.

Creek crossing 2.0 was a footbridge that we built from trees felled on the property.  It lasted for about two years, and was nearly perfect.  The only flaw was that everyone except me, Mark, and my mom refused to walk across it because the five foot drop below it terrified them.  Wimps. :-)  One option would be to rebuild a similar footbridge, but actually spend a little bit of money for treated lumber and add a handrail.  To deal with high water, it would probably need to be about twenty feet long.

Creek crossing 3.0 consists of three cinderblocks placed along the edge of the ford.  When the water is only a foot deep (80% of the time), these are actually one of the best crossing options.  You hop from block to block and keep your feet dry.  They can be a bit wobbly, but folks seem to be less scared of them than of the footbridge.  They do wash away during floods, though. 

One option we're considering is building a more high tech version of creek crossing 3.0 --- cementing stepping stones to the bottom of the creek using rebar and making them two blocks high to accommodate higher water.  Or perhaps three blocks high with half of the bottom block sunk into the creek bottom.  Not sure if we'd need to make the stepping stone four blocks in diameter like this drawing to make people feel comfortable or just two.

There's also a log spanning the creek that we shimmy across when desperate to get in or out during extremely high water.  This is vastly suboptimal, and we've considering replacing it with two ziplines --- one to take you across the creek and the other to take you back.  When I started researching ziplines, though, they looked to be out of our price range for our current creek crossing plans.  I'm not interested in spending more than $100 on the creek right now.  Plus, clearly the folks who wouldn't walk across the footbridge are unlikely to brave a zipline, so we'd have to create an alternative option anyway.

So, what do you think?  Bridge, stepping stones, zipline, or another option entirely?  I'd love to see links to other websites where people have installed low cost creek crossings.  Just keep in mind that anything less than five or six feet off the creek bottom will be washed away unless extremely securely attached. 

As we reach the rafters of the homemade storage building, we're using primarily scavenged lumber and are discovering that it has its pros and cons.

On the pro side, that old wood is hard --- Mark screws straight into storebought lumber as if it's balsa wood, but our scavenged boards require pilot holes.  The scavenged lumber also comes in much thicker sections --- no 1.5 inch lumber here.  From a very project-specific standpoint, the scavenged wood makes awesome rafters because it's already cut to the length of the tin (that we plan to reuse) and has a handy notch in just the right place.

On the other hand, scavenged lumber isn't quite so modular as those regular 2X4s.  We've had to add a spacer here and there since some rafters are thicker than others.  Furthermore, the brackets that Mark found in the barn to secure the non-notched ends of the rafters to the header would have fit 2X4s but not our old rafters.  Luckily, Mark was able to cut the brackets in half and they worked just fine.

Of course, you all know my main motivation in using scavenged lumber --- price.  It's hard to beat free, especially since it doesn't take any longer to tear the boards out of the old building than it would take to drive to the nearest big box store.  You sure do buy less when you live in the middle of nowhere.

 

We managed to get all the roof rafters installed today along with most of the cross sections on the home-made storage building.

 

These hens seem to be getting along better since I installed the additional 2 roosting posts.

This was my solution yesterday to the problem of the creek still being a few inches too high.

You still get some water creeping in, but your pants and socks stay dry for a quick trip into town to visit the post office and hardware store.

 

Today we installed some hard wood beams from the old house on the top of our walls to form a solid box for the storage buiding. We decided to extend each side out by a foot to provide some additional cover for the outer walls.

This video started out as a serious summary of Monday morning's work on the homemade storage building.  Then I sped it up so you wouldn't be sitting around waiting for something to happen.  And suddenly the chipmunk noises made me laugh.

Mark watched it and said something along the lines of, "That's nice, dear."  I think I may just have an odd sense of humor....  Hope at least a few of you get a kick out of it.

 

We closed in on finishing up the walls for the do it yourself storage bulding today. It was such a treat to have the sun on our backs during the afternoon portion of the project.

In doing some research for the home made storage building I discovered the term garden office which is how they describe some sheds in parts of Europe.

Shedworking.co is a great place to browse pictures of other garden offices to spark your imagination and learn new techniques.

I'm partial to this thatch roof design, but don't think it would work for us here.

The frozen water shuffle got a bit easier after I installed a plastic faucet onto the pour spout of our 6 gallon jug.

One of the least important casualties in the blizzard of '09 was our clothesline.  The wet snow clung to our old cotton line so heavily that three of the four strings snapped!  They were pretty rotten anyway, so rather than tie yet another knot in them, I opted to replace all four.

Our barn is a royal mess, but it has its uses.  A few minutes of poking around turned up a spool of some kind of cable --- plastic over wire.  Perfect clothesline replacement at an unbeatable price!

Once I cut the new line pieces to the right length and tied them in place, I started wondering whether that cable should have been saved for something more important.  I hope it wasn't leftover ethernet cable from Joey's yurt....

As we pull together our first semi-serious structure on the farm, we've received a lot of feedback from really helpful folks who want us to build something more sturdy.  Some of the feedback is right on track --- we are new to this after all and we just miss some steps.  For example, we'll be adding a header to both load-bearing walls to fix the window/door problem and will add rim joists on the ends of the floor joists.

On the other hand, we've intentionally underbuilt some areas rather than following the conventional wisdom to build a house that'll last two hundred years.  Americans seem to be obsessed with building things to last centuries --- odd since Europeans have only been on this continent for a few hundred years.  As a nation, we build out of steel and concrete, then opt to tear it all down twenty years later to build something bigger and better.  The rubble is unusable --- pure waste.  It's almost as if we're struggling to overcome our own mortality, or to prove ourselves immune to the natural cycle of decay.

When we visited Mexico, our tour guide told us that traditional Mayan families tore down their houses and rebuilt them every few years.  The structures were made of plant matter that could end up back in the garden, so this wasn't really waste.  They also built modularly, making several small structures instead of one huge house so that when one hut had to be taken down it didn't turn their lives inside out.  Similarly, the folks who lived on our farm before us believed that a dozen rocks sitting on the ground were a fine foundation for their house --- and the structure stood for three quarters of a century.  I think all of these people had a good point --- why not build something simpler and cheaper that won't last forever and instead plan to repair or replace in a decade or two?

Granted, if you live in the city or are paying off a mortgage, you probably have to build for the long haul and abide by nitpicky building codes, spending ten times as much money on your house as is actually necessary.  The freedom to do our own thing is one of the many reasons we love our farm.  Sure, some of our experiments will probably fail, and our building piers may start to rot out in ten or twenty years.  But we've barely put any cash into it, so we can just rebuild.

Or maybe we're just young and stupid. :-)  Time will tell....

Blue skies and above freezing temperatures helped us to breeze through two and a half more wall sections of our home made storage building project today.

Halfway through our homemade storage building project, we opted to make a few changes.  It was originally envisioned as a workshop where Mark could build our chicken waterers, but once we decided to put the exterior wood stove inside, it made sense to repurpose it as Mark's bedroom/office instead.  In its new incarnation, though, the bed would have been too close to the stove, and Mark wanted to raise his mattress up a bit, so we decided to add another four feet to the  length of the structure.

Tuesday, we installed the floor for the bed addition, which felt a bit like doing homework math problems --- you get a chance to correct the misunderstandings you made the first time around and to cement the proper method into your motor memory.  This time, I took Shannon's advice and put the rim joists on right away, which had the added benefit of meaning that we didn't need to use expensive brackets.

We used salvaged three by fours for the floor joists.  The sawmill lumber wasn't exactly straight, but I suspect it'll be just as strong as store bought two by sixes.  After all, the three by fours really are three inches by four inches, so they have nearly half again as much cross-sectional area as the two by sixes.

Anna and Lucy are the miter saw experts on this job. I'm just backing them up with some heavy lifting and the occasional two cents.

 

The team at KMS woodworks has made some interesting progress in bringing together a compact solar charger that can be used for several low end power needs like a lap top. They are still in the testing stage, but it looks like they might make them available for sale in the 300 to 350 dollar range in the not too distant future.

It would be worth that much to me if it could power our modem and both lap tops for a few hours per day, especially during a power outage.

I really like the idea of having a portable off the grid option, especially one that can be taken on a back pack to provide the power for blog posts in some random ancient megalith site or more Mayan ruins.

 

The 6th wall section is now up and looking like a storage building.

Using this utility pump to fill a proper water container feels like a huge improvement over last year's 5 gallon bucket method. The biggest downside was lifting the bucket back out once you filled it as full as you dared.

Today's homesteading tip originated with my mother, I swear, not with a homeless person.  On a farm, it's awfully easy to get your boots wet even if they're waterproof.  Maybe the world is full of deep, damp snow (like last week) and clods drop down the back of your heel.  Maybe you slip off the creek bank while sawing through a grapevine (like this week) and your foot submerges in frigid water.  Either way, the worst thing you can do is keep working with wet feet.  But if you don't have a good pair of spare boots, what do you do?

Take a plastic grocery store bag and wrap it around your dryly socked foot.  Then slide the whole shebang into your boot --- this has the added bonus of making boots slide on even easier!  The grocery store bag separates your foot from the damp boot wall until the evening, when you can set your footware by the stove to dry.  Dry feet!

I'd be the first one to tell you that our homemade storage building has growing pains.  Although I've read a lot of books and websites, this is the first time I've ever put screw to 2x4, and it shows.

We probably could have the whole thing done by now if we knew what we were doing, but we've still got two walls to raise and the roof to put on before we even start on the interior.  Still, I can feel the building process picking up momentum as we repeat steps we've figured out in the past.

Monday, Mark let me try my hand at framing a wall.  Those square bits that come in the screw boxes make it much easier for a novice like me to drive screws without stripping the heads.

I nearly finished the half wall section I was working on before I ran out of lumber.  Unfortunately, we had to call it quits for the day since we got a flat driving the golf cart through ice to the cars where the rest of the 2x4s are stored.  Mark's teaching me that things happen on a farm --- you just have to roll with it and allow plenty of extra time to get projects done!

Cutting through difficult nails within a tight space like this is where these reciprocating saws really shine. The medium sized metal blade allows you to bend it at an angle, just don't bend it too much or it will kick like a mule.

 

10 years ago I found this hand cranked radio in the discount bin of a Radio Shack just after the Y2K hype was settling down. Most hand powered devices use a small dynamo that charges an even smaller battery that will eventually stop holding a charge over time. This unit uses a medium sized spring that slowly releases its mechanical power after the energy is stored in the form of hand cranks. It will hold up to 40 cranks, which equals about 20 minutes of power.

The radio is very basic and also works on a little solar cell that is embedded in the top, but only if you place it directly in the sun. I like to have it on hand as a back up power source and someday dream of building a larger version that might be more capable of powering something like our modem and router and maybe a laptop or two. It only produces enough electricity for a small flashlight, which can be considered night time entertainment during a power outage.

 

Happy New Year!

We started 2010 on a level footing by plugging away at our latest storage building project today.

Rather than getting his feet wet on Tuesday, Mark opted to tear down the old house.  I've been poking away at this project a tiny bit at a time as my wrists allowed, but Mark dove in with a vengeance.  Before I knew it, the roof was gone!

Now we've got wood to create the roof supports on our new homemade storage building.  The lumber is three quarters of a century old, but most of it is still good and hard.  The wood is probably oak or maybe even chestnut and is significantly harder than the soft two by fours we buy at the lumber yard.

Check out our ebook about creating a microbusiness and quitting your job.

 

I spotted this small crew off in the distance while I was working outside on the do it yourself storage building project. It gave me a glimmer of hope that something was going to get started today, but that was not meant to be.

Maybe they're getting everything ready for an early start tomorrow?

The Ford Festiva stalling issue came back when the gas tank hit the 1/4 level point. Something the chainsaw repair guy said after he tuned up our Stihl recently got me to thinking. His comment was that he had to use his special carburetor bath 4 separate times to get all the gunk cleaned out. This prompted me to give the Festiva another Seafoam treatment, and it took over half the tank before the problem finally went away, but it's running like it should now and it's all thanks to Seafoam.

These new peel and stick solar panels are more efficient than the fragile glass panels and cost about 300 bucks less. This new design allows for more robust applications, such as on the roof of a golf cart without the fear of your expensive panel breaking. Having the sun constantly charging your batteries prevents the sulfates from building up and extends the life of the battery bank by a minimum of 25%.

Since a golf cart is sometimes considered an electric car by the IRS you can deduct a nice 30% of your solar investment and you may even qualify for a few hundred bucks per year as a battery credit. These kits usually cost about 1600 dollars, weigh about 4 pounds and take about 15 minutes to install.

Add an inverter and it can double as an emergency back up power system for your home if you can manage to park it close enough to reach an extension cord to.

Fire.

We now have the exterior wood burning stove operating in the half finished storage building. This must be what it felt like when early cave men figured out that keeping your woman warm equals keeping her happy.

This chicken tractor is slated for upgrade in early 2010. I got a bit carried away with the construction and ended up making it too heavy, which creates a problem when dragging it to a new location.

The other problem is an issue of access. It really needs another door close to the ground. That way if they escape you can coax them back in easily with a bribe of chicken feed.

 

I think this is the design I've settled on for increasing the load capacity of the golf cart. You can order the shiny new metal version for about 350 dollars, or maybe a sheet of plywood with a few 2x6's could become a nice low budget home made dump box for your golf cart. Soon this project will move from my imagination to the Wetknee drawing board once the storage building project gets wrapped up.

 

What happens when you don't tighten down the lug nuts on your golf cart and drive for several weeks as they slowly loosen? The lug nut threads get worn, creating a problem that requires a replacement.

A trip to the local hardware store proved the special nuts were not a common item, but a regular one was that had the same thread ratio, and to compensate for the lack of shoulder I just added a beefy washer. We've been driving it this way for a couple of months now with no problem.

The refrigerator root cellar suffered a set back last night during a heavy down pour.

It should only take a few hours to dig back out, and the new plan is to add a small roof like the one on our home made firewood shed to prevent this from happening again.

The foot bridge suffered a fatal error recently when the weaker walnut support cracked and sagged, making it unsafe for anyone to use.

We've decided to not rebuild it and instead upgrade the stepping stone crossing and install a zip line for when the water would be over the new steps.

We had a slight problem with one of the retaining walls for the refrigerator root cellar. It seems like a sturdy metal bracket will be needed to secure the wall to the side of the refrigerator.

You might notice a faint circle of melted snow around the chimney output. This was more noticeable a couple of hours ago, which is a nice way to illustrate how warm the air must be that's coming out.

In the 4th generation of our home made chicken tractors I decided to add a day time roost in addition to the night time area. I don't have any proof, but I think it's good for the morale of the flock to have multiple areas where a hen can be to herself and get some personal space.

There are many secrets to cultivating mushrooms, but the technique that seems to be most employed if you want to increase your yield is to use the glass jar method.

This involves using something like organic brown rice or brown flour, staying away from anything with preservatives that will work against mushroom growth.  The trick is to keep the mixture sterile, with about 1/4 cup of distilled water. Most people seem to think a pressure cooker is needed at 15 pounds for an hour to guard against contamination, once it's cool it acts as the perfect environment for your spawn to multiply in. It would be interesting to compare Anna's  wet cardboard method with the jar trick and see just how much more you can expect for all that extra fuss.

 

Lawrence Weingarten was kind enough to share his oyster mushroom cultivation secrets in an easy to understand web page with plenty of pictures. He starts by shredding up a bale of wheat straw and then cooking it in water at 160 degrees for about an hour. You've now made your own pasteurized substrate. Drain it and carefully mix in the proper amount of spawn, which is mycelium growing on grain or cardboard. Stuff it all in a tall plastic bag and hang it up somewhere safe. Follow his instructions on humidity and temperature levels and you'll have a serious harvest of fruit to enjoy in less than a week.

 

Anna's mushroom post this morning sent me on a research trail that led all the way to a Fungus farm in Singapore. These nice pictures illustrate how one can make their own man made logs out of a simple plastic bag. I imagine the bag is filled with some sort of saw dust.

We've been thinking of trying something like this in the refrigerator root cellar to see if we can achieve mushroom production on a year round basis.

 

 

The walls are now half way finished on the storage building project.

I guess that means it's time to make up our mind on what type of door to install.

 

It was easy to secure down the first two walls of the storage building project while Anna held each one in place. Now we need to make some decisions on window placement for the next set of walls.

 

It's time to begin framing up the walls of the new storage building.

We decided to fill the wall that gets the most sun with windows we've managed to salvage from a few different places. Thanks Bill B.

The landfill can be a good place to find used windows for a project like this if you don't have generous neighbors who've cleaned out their barn recently. New construction sites have also been known to provide the frugal builder with discarded windows if you know where to look and who to talk to.

Temperature is the real test of a successful root cellar, with optimal temperatures from 32 F to 40 F, but with temperatures from 40 F to 50 F considered quite good.  I've seen quite a few fancy root cellars constructed with vast quantities of labor and cash which fail the simple temperature test.  Can our $10 root cellar do better?

We won't know for sure how our root cellar holds up until it has to deal with really hot days and really cold nights, but so far it's running great.  Over the last few days since Mark completed the fridge root cellar, it has held a semi-steady temperature between 40 F and 52 F.  I'll keep you updated on the temperature variations as the year progresses.

If you missed parts of the construction details, you might want to read back over our old entries (linked below), or watch the video here which sums it all up in a two and a half minute nutshell.  I hope that some of you are inspired to eschew the fancy root cellar craze and make your own root cellar for cheap.

 

In doing some research for an upgrade to the home made cat door I stumbled upon this fascinating project by Quantumpicture.com.

This home made cat door uses a low budget and clever way of taking a picture just before the cat reaches the door to enter. If the picture shows anything in your cats mouth like a mouse the computer tells the door not to let him in. Same thing is true if a skunk or other animal tries to get in. If he's all by himself the computer grants permission and unlocks the door. You can also use this system to keep track of how many times your cat goes in and out, complete with a fancy program that will send a picture to your cell phone every time an event happens.

Our cats have always kept their hunting prizes outside, and Lucy does a great job of keeping other small animals out of the yard, so we won't be going to this extreme. Quantumpictures is working on a self contained unit that will be available from their website in the near future.

 

It's easy to make your own home made automatic chicken waterer with a 5 gallon bucket and one of our do it yourself kits.

 

The refrigerator root cellar is now generating a cool and damp atmosphere which needs to be protected from insects looking for the perfect home to ride out the winter.

It was easy to secure down the lower vent screen with several small dry wall screws. They drive straight into the plastic without the need for a pilot hole.

The top vent was just as easy. Cut some scrap screen material to the desired length and use some electrical tape to fasten it down.

 

The gaskets on the refrigerator root cellar are old and don't quite seal up the two doors. A simple screen door latch is all it takes to solve that problem. I installed them a little on the tight side in order to pull the door firmly closed with no gaps. The refrigerator latch required a piece of scrap wood behind the handle for the eye to bite into.

This might work for a low budget fix to a working refrigerator that has a weak gasket. I've often heard a new gasket can cost nearly as much as a good used refrigerator.

I was almost going to buy one of those heavy PVC caps for the refrigerator root cellar chimney, but when I walked past a foam faucet cover I stopped in my tracks, looked at the PVC cap in one hand and the foam cover on the shelf and weighed the coolness factor of the foam geometry along with the fact that it was only a buck compared to the 6 dollar price of the PVC.

Anna thinks it adds a sort of mother ship look to it and I agree.

The next step will be to drill some holes in the side towards the top of the chimney and then attach some screen material to keep out any unwanted bugs.

 

It took both of us to lower the refrigerator root cellar into its new home below the earth. Once it was in place I decided to make some side panels from a couple of 2x4's and some scrap wood. It seems to be helping by keeping the dirt away from the hinge and door opening as I begin to bury it.

 

Two drill holes and a few minutes with the jig saw was all it took to create the new chimney hole for the refrigerator root cellar.

I also removed the foam and plastic barrier that separates the freezer from the rest of the refrigerator. One of the metal shelves slid right into its place, which will provide plenty of open space for the cool air to flow while at the same time working as a sturdy surface to store apples on.

 

After thinking about lowering the refrigerator root cellar into our new hole I decided to see just how hard it would be to strip off the metal coil from the back of the unit. It turns out it only took about a half hour to take everything off including the compressor and wiring harness. I think it's going to make sliding down the hole a bit smoother and safer.

I'm planning on mounting some screen material over the new holes in the bottom. The good thing about this approach is that it will be easy to add more holes if we think the air flow needs to increase.

 

We decided to dig the refrigerator root cellar down a bit deeper to accommodate a large cinder block in each corner. I thought two post holes in the middle might help to increase the cold surface area that will hopefully stream a steady flow of cool air up through the refrigerator and out the soon to be installed vent pipe.

The new chipper/grinder seems to have a problem with sticks and branches any bigger than what you see here in this short video. It's sort of a hassle to stop everything and flip it on its side to reset it once you send something through that's too big.

It still might find a place here on the farm, but today the verdict is too small and wimpy for the level of mulch production we are looking for.

 

The old gas powered chipper/grinder got moved up to the front of the get fixed line this week in an effort to increase our mulch production. Its 50 year old Briggs and Stratton engine won the first battle yesterday afternoon, but today I figured out exactly what to do with that stubborn motor.

Delete it.

The first step was to remove the four bolts that hold the engine to the frame. Then it's easy to lift out. Next fabricate some sort of vibration plate for the electric motor to be attached to, I used a scrap piece of 2x6. Once you get the pulley lined up secure the whole thing down to the frame and wire up a switch.