Simple living requires a healthy dose of frugality and some handy man skills. In this section, you can read our blog posts about unusual and unique do it yourself projects we've undertaken.
Start from the bottom of the page to read about our adventure in order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our chick waterers are perfect to give baby
chickens the clean water they need to get off to a good start on life.
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.)
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.
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!
Check out our chick waterers, perfect for day old
chickens.
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?
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.
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.
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!
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
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.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
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 post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
This
is my new wall --- I'm so proud of making it (nearly) all by
myself. That said, I should have measured a little better to make
it "square" (a perfect rectangle) so that we didn't have to take it
back apart to get the window to fit....
Next time, I'm not going
to assume that the diagonals being off by a quarter of an inch is
okay. Unsurprisingly, Mark decided he would be in charge of
putting in the door, which is the next step.
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!
Our microbusiness ebook
doesn't just tell you how to set up a business, it gives you tips for
living simply.
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.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
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?
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Building a Storage Building from Scratch
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This
post is part of our Fridge Root
Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
Read all of the entries:
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.