Month: December 2024

Bathroom remodel prep work

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Winter can be seen from our house, the foothills of the Blue Mountains are covered in snow and on top the local snowpack is 175% of normal. It’s 44 F today at our house and the most we get is rain on a fairly regular basis now. It is supposed to rain almost every day this week. Of course I never bother to look at the weather person predictions unless we are spraying or cutting hay so I thought it would be a great idea to move some dry wood around on the farm.

Mr Rainman had emptied out one of the old grain bins and the plan is to get all of the rough cut black walnut and maple out there and store it until it is needed for some project. All of the trees were obtained from family or friends for the labor of removing them from the property. I had them custom cut into slabs at our local mini mill. The hardest part is having the space to sticker them and let them dry out. We have had the maple for over 15 years and some of the black walnut for eight years. I have one massive piece of 10 foot black walnut that is 20” wide with one raw edge and 18’ thick, ten feet long. It has split in two almost dead center so that there are now two pieces with a live edge. It has another 5 years to dry out, you only get 1” per year when air drying. The large crack will help it dry out faster as it is almost 1/2” in width. I wanted to get it all in one spot where we do not go, it won’t get damaged so we can use our other spaces. I have about 1/3 of the old chicken coop full of rough cut wood. I would like to get that wood all moved out, do some slight rearranging in the chicken coop and then I can move out most of the tools and storage from the old house. This will give me an open room for projects near the house. A lot of what is in the old house is in bins for various types of activity. There is a bin for working sheet rock, bin for installing ceramic tile, bin for painting, shelf of finishing nailers and supplies, several bins for wiring a house, various organizers for parts, nails, screws and a shelf for ice fishing. I have not been in 20 years, but there are a lot of mini rods!

Gingerman and I went out yesterday and started to load the flatbed with black walnut boards, 1” thick, then 2” then we got to the 3” slabs that are ten feet long and those are heavy! We got the first load all onto the trailer and had a plan to come back for the maple. The rest of the black walnut is in the main barn off of one of the hay rooms and is not currently in the way. We drove to the grain bin over the sketchy culvert I have in the barn lot. It really needs to be dug out and reset as the water is going through, under, and alongside it. This is causing the dirt to collapse so I keep jamming large boulders alongside the culvert to prevent anything from falling into the gap. I have a couple more years before total failure hits. We ended up needing to take out the door metal supports on the grain bin, these add structural strength to the door so it does not blow out when grain is in the bin. I swept up and as we were finishing cleaning it started to rain. So now our dry wood is getting wet and I did not bring enough stickers to put between the slabs. We hustled and got all the wood in and set some leaning on the perimeter to be stacked next time we try and move wood.

I really want to get this done in the next week so I can build the bathroom cabinet in the current storage room. It would help immensely.

Since it was raining I decided to back to working on the new bathroom vanity. Gingerman helped me and we got the holes for the sink and faucet placed on the dresser top. I had found some boards out in the old chicken coop to use on the dresser transformation to vanity. The dresser is made out of oak but I am not adding oak pieces for the transformation. I will stick with some Douglas fir and stain it. I was able to get the large drawer put together with nails and glue, it needs to spend the night in the office to dry. I will be able to cut the back out of it once dry and it will still work as a partial drawer, over one half was able to be saved. I have a small drawer on the top that will only be about 3-4” deep. I may put a couple of 2” long spots on the side, I have not decided yet as to whether they would actually be usable.

We were fortunate enough to get more baby chicks on Friday from Mr Horse Tamer. He has an incubator and started 30 eggs, we got 29 straight run chicks. I spent Friday evening putting down new bedding, food and water in the baby chicks area for them. One had splayed legs and he told me to tape the legs together for 24 hours and it sometimes gives the hip muscles time to firm up and the chicks will do well. Gingerman and I took the tape off the next day and the chick is moving around and doing great. We had one yellow chick just die but everyone else is doing great. They have a heat lamp and a heat shelter so even though they are in an unheated coop they are staying nice and warm. I decided to use the heat lamp in conjunction with the shelter as it will also keep the water from freezing solid if it gets that cold.

The check came from the auction and we were gloriously surprised! Those 18 whethers weighed on average 98# and sold for $160/each! They killed it, the auction website said the average price for lambs was $55-150. We scored, those sheep looked amazing, the timing and quantity all rolled up to form the perfect circumstances.

Spring cleaned out finally

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Gingerman and the daughter came home for the weekend. I had plans on not doing anything outside as we needed to get the Christmas decorations finished. Annmarie had her village all set up but the rest of the house had nothing but a bare tree. Saturday morning it only took about an hour to get all of the rest of our Christmas stuff set up. The Gingerman had brought his large chainsaw with big bar and he wanted some directions on which trees to cut. This gave me a great reason to abandon the Christmas setup (we were on the last thing). So I put on a vest and went outside, the weather was amazing, it was almost 50 F. I grabbed a chain and fired up the Kubota and we drove out to field #4b.

Way before we moved back, 18 years ago, someone had felled a bunch of large trees and then they pushed them next to the existing trees instead of removing or burning them. There has not been running water down that part of the field for a long time before we moved back. We have had running water now for almost five years from the spring above. I have been wanting to cut those trees up and burn them forever but they are so massive they won’t come out with the tractor and I tried to burn a few and only got a partial burn.

The Gingerman was able to make a few cuts before his saw heated up and quit working. So this gave me time to move the pieces out and start stacking them up. We opted to just keep the piles on each side so I did not have to try and carry any wood across the spring. I was able to drive the tractor through the ditch and onto the other side without difficulty.

This worked pretty great as the Gingerman kept helping me and the saw kept cooling off. So about the time I had everything on the pile he was able to cut a few more pieces. There were a couple of casualties. I managed to poke out one of the headlights from a branch sticking out of the burn pile. I was trying to get closer to dump off wood on the center of the pile. Near the end I used the tractor forks to break up dead branches from the live trees and managed to bend the backstop on the forks some. It still works just fine, I just twisted a part near the top of the backstop.

I ended up feeding the cows a large bale then dropped off the forks and the weight bucket on the 3 point hitch. The tractor dealer is coming out this week to take it in for some annual maintenance. I have a list of items that need to be repaired also that I will tape to the steering wheel tomorrow.

I am hopeful that Mr Rainman can come out one day this next week and finish cleaning up the small branches near the spring and hopefully we will have a burn day soon. We want to burn both piles.

That only took a couple of hours and I decided to get started on creating our vanity for the bathroom remodel. So I started tearing apart the dresser and removing the bottoms from all of the drawers. Normally, I would not do that but this had been inhabited by a lot of mice. So I sanded the entire cabinet inside and out. I want the vanity to look aged so I half sanded the finish. I will clean it up then stain over it all and then seal it up. It should still look very old. We need to order new handles and drawer pulls. I still have one drawer to tear apart but someone at some point has already tried to repair the dresser. So I have been sanding glue and chipping drawer bottom out of the grooves. Originally, those bottoms would have been held in place by two nails at the back of the drawer. They should have been super easy to remove. Instead they had a lot of glue and extra nails. The last drawer has OSB glued to the bottom! This will be the drawer that I cut part out for the plumbing. I will have to do this to one of the top half size drawers also. They will be super narrow in the front, 6-8” at most.

I will draw out the holes on the top and then drill them out. This way I can just take the vanity to the stone countertop place and have them match the top shape and the holes.

Less crazy is a good thing

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I came home early on Monday so Mr Rainman and I could sort the cows. We wanted to wean off the babies and move them down with the teenagers, then sort off the bull and put him in Alcatraz, pull six horned cows off the herd and load up into the trailer to go to the sale first thing Tuesday morning, and let the other momma cows go toward the upper pastures. This was all preceded by getting the cows into the corral. Despite three attempts the two of us could not drive the cows toward the corral. We need the arena panels to go across the spring access in the barn lot, the cows just kept breaking around us.

I went into the house and retrieved the border collie Chance so that the cows would move. There were some explicitly worded commands given once she started to ignore me. Eventually, we got the cows into the corral. Mr Rainman had just finished the last of the repairs on the corral on Monday and it worked. We managed to get six of the horned devils into the trailer.

They were dropped off at the auction house and the check for their sale already came to the house! It was pretty much what I expected for cows who are old and just had calves weaned off the day before. The important part is that they are no longer on the farm. The herd was already calmer once we got the crazy out of the group.

We are back to having to do nightly feeding of the sheep in the barn again. They take seven bales spread out amongst the feeders. I set out 10 bales initially and figured out what they could eat in a day from that. There are a couple of bales in the feeders that they don’t particularly like so if they want to nibble on something they are there. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of feeding the sheep at night, chase all the sheep out first and shut the door of the barn before feeding. The first night was total chaos with the sheep running around and jumping on the bales as I attempted to unwrap them to load them into the feeders. A couple of the bales had to stay on the floor as I could not get them away from the sheep. I now follow the cardinal rule when feeding and it is a lot more organized and a lot faster.

Experiment a success

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Today we went and picked up the sheep from Hermiston. They probably could have gone a couple more weeks but we can maybe start a little earlier next year. It was a success for the land owner and the field looks great. Their first cutting of hay next year will look very nice. We brought all of our light panels from the barn and were able to form a chute to the trailers. Initially, we had a Y setup but the stupid sheep did not want to go through the chute system so we had to push them and do one trailer at a time. We took down the temporary fence and rolled it all up, we will reuse it next year. The field was so wet that no one used the water trough, they just drank from the various low spots that had a few inches of water. We ended up just loading up all of the sheep into the two trailers then drove them to our house. We backed up to the corral and then unloaded each trailer into the corral area and then we sorted the sheep off into three batches. One group went back into the trailer-those were Wil’s, one group to the back pen-all boys, and last group was all females and the two rams. Since we have three pens that worked great and all of us managed a single gate to move them in or out of the chute as they were moved in. This worked great and took us about 45 minutes.

Once Mr Horse Tamer had his and left we sorted off all of the lambs and put them back in with their mothers. We also sorted off the two rams and moved them into Alcatraz. Then we sorted the boys and took 13 off that are already sold and turned them in with the mothers. They won’t get slaughtered until early January. That left us with 18 lambs that will go to the auction next week. This will be the first time we have ever taken any to the auction so we hope it treats us well, but you never know. We had to move the feeders back into the barn and filled them all with hay. We won’t have lambs until early April 2025.

Mr Rainman and I worked on getting the bee shelter completed this week. He got the posts set and frame built. I made a trip to Home Depot and got three sheets of roofing tin at $45/each. The prices for materials these days are amazingly bad. Now is not the time to build a new building. We were able to use up the last of the 1x8x8’ boards on the shelter. We had to go to a board and batten siding pattern as we did not have enough lumber to go over each side twice. It is very loud inside the enclosure when someone is working on the roof with an impact driver. If the bees complain of the noise we can line the roof with plywood to dampen the sound. I will wait for the complaint department to voice an issue before doing this. We did have to put up a panel to keep the alpaca and cows out of the shelter, they had already found it before we had the roof on it and were hanging around. I had opened up the orchard to allow them to come in and knock down the foot tall grass. Now that there are no leaves on the trees they will leave them alone.

We were also able to but the boards on the new rock crib on the corral. It used up the last two rough cut 2×8 inch tamarack boards I had left from building Alcatraz. We cobbled it together and Mr Rainman will fill it with rocks tomorrow and put a panel over the new gate so the sheep don’t crawl under or through it. We used the old gate today to keep them from going through the new gate, by propping it on the inside of the new gate.

We have finally started getting eggs again, we are getting about a 30% production rate which is normal for us in the winter. Wil is hatching 30 chicks for us so that should get us 15 more hens. By mid summer we should be back up to 30 hens.

After all of that today, I needed a nap and I got one!

It’s cold outside

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Winter is finally here. It is down in the low 20’s F at night and barely over freezing during the day. So it is not super pleasant to be outside. I have been so busy that I have not done much around the farm. Luckily, Mr Rainman is still cleaning up and working on small things. He was able to get the three posts installed on the corral. The two internal posts required that the old posts get reset and tightened up also. There is not a bit of wiggle in that side of the corral now! You used to be able to grab the rail and move the fence a few inches in each direction. The last thing for the corral is to finish building the rock crib. It just needs some wooden sides and wire mesh inside that to hold all the rocks inside. It will take 4-6 hours to fill the entire space with rocks but by the time it is completed there will be no moving that side of the corral and the new gate will be anchored securely.

The Gingerman spotted that our main gate into the barn lot broke at the base on the hinge side. When the gate was used it was starting to flex apart due to the break. In true farmer fashion, he plugged in the welder, dug around in the scrap pile and dirt to find some old small metal pieces then proceeded to just randomly weld them in place until the crack was repaired. He then tack welded the hinges as the bolts were not holding them rigid. He also raised the gate a few inches and dug out the hinge side so it no longer drags when you open and close it. The gate works better now than it has in 15 years!

Mr Rainman also got all of the holes dug around the bee platform. I had to make a run over to Home Depot last week so I was able to get all of the pressure treated lumber necessary for building an arch over the bee platform. I am going to use the same 1×8”x8’ pieces we used on the inside of the fencing shed to sheet the outside of the arch. I also have some leftover metal roofing from working on the barn that I will use for the roof. The wind just tore up the empty hives we had on the platform. If there had been bees in them I am not sure we could have salvaged them after the storm. The bees are hard enough to keep without us just letting the wind destroy them. We already have a new Nuc ordered for the spring and Annmarie is fairly confident she can split the hive fairly easily now. I would like to see us going into next winter with three hives.

We are still getting ready for the bathroom remodel. I have ordered the tile for the last two walls, which look like linen wallpaper. I am looking at the custom cabinet design for the right side of the vanity that I want, so I can start in on it soon. This has to be wife approved, it will be made out of oak plywood.

I did the cabinet mock up and the wife did not like the single door on the sink side of the cabinet. It will house all the electronics, my electric razor, hearing aids and any other items that need electrical outlets. This will clean off the countertop. So I had to move it to the front. Now I just need to go buy my three full sheets of 3/4” oak plywood. I will have to do the doors last but they can wait for now.