Farm

Office now heated!

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Well it was a productive week. I managed to get Mr Professional out on Sunday so we could work on the last wall. The tongue and groove is warped so it is near impossible to install alone as you cannot beat it into submission alone. The wall got sealed again around the window and the rest of the insulation installed around the window. While he did the insulation I crawled up into the attic and installed three junction boxes. I cut the power to the old junction box and then pulled those three lines up into the new attic boxes. I then pulled the feeder lines from the old box, reglued some new turns onto the pipe and rerouted the line to the new junction box. I only had the power off for about an hour. Once the new box was online I had to verify three times that the freezers really had power! That was my greatest fear with switching out the main boxes. I was even able to use a spare piece of the main feeder line to connect both grounding strips together.

We worked on cleaning up the office. It was hard to move around in there with all the trash and tools. We took out one industrial size trash bag out of that single room. The last eight pieces of long tongue and groove we had to just cut in half and cut some bad ends off. It was just too warped to be able to beat into submission. After a few hours we called it done. About half the outlets work in the office now so I should be able to plug in most of the tools and chargers so that I can work in a heated room.

I can work in a heated room now because the heat guys came out during the week and installed the heat pump to the outside of the old house! Since I had turned the power on they were able to complete the install and turn the heat pump on! Annmarie said that it was fairly toasty in the room. I have not even gotten the attic over the room insulated or the inside door installed. Once those two things are done the room should be perfect, not completed yet though. I will still need to sand the floor. I am not going to finish the walls until after I get the floor sanded and sealed. Then I can use air pressure to blow the walls clean and finish them last. I can see the end zone!

Office continues

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I finally managed to get back out to the office today. My plans last weekend were thwarted by the flu! I had flu starting on Sunday and was out all week from work. Which meant I actually worked at the paying job on Friday to try and catch up. The heating guy called on Friday and wanted to know if we were ready for the heat pump to be installed. Now I don’t have power yet but we did get the wall finished last week so Annmarie told them yes. The inside unit was able to be installed in a couple of hours. This has prompted me to make the big push to get power up and going in the new box. Today I went out and wired all the rest of the switches and outlets on the finished walls. This only leaves me four outlets on the unfinished wall to complete. I got the workroom light installed and hooked up to the switch. I even managed to tear open one of the track lights for the main area and get it all set up and ready to install. The plan for tomorrow is to get the three lights installed and the three terminal boxes in the attic installed. As soon as I cut the power to the current box I can pull the three wires into the attic, wire them into the boxes and move the power supply to the new box. Viola! New box will be installed and then I can get the last wall covered.

We did get some snow, then a chinook wind and now a lot of mud. It’s supposed to get down to the low teens next week and snow some more. This time of year we bounce all over the place.

Winterizing still and office run

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Mr Rainman came out today! He agreed to come out and help me get caught up on the office for a few days. He brought a helper who is willing to help finish winterizing the place. I have dubbed him Mr BeardMePlease! He needs a lot of work to get that beard to fill in. He dug right in and got the gooseneck hitch installed in the pickup and got the raspberries and blackberries trimmed and tied up for the winter. The pickup kept dying, but it has not really even been driven for almost two months. I need to rotate rigs driven to work on a more regular basis. Each vehicle should not go more than two weeks without getting driven.

Mr Rainman and I worked on the office. The plan was to get the East wall completed today. Unfortunately, this did not occur. We had a hard time getting the two top boards in place. There was much hammering and cussing. We ended up having to sand the board in place over the door opening. This took quite a bit of time. I worked on building a window box for the casing. My lack of attention to detail caused the pieces to be cut three different times and I had to tear the box apart once due to a piece going in wrong side out. I did finally manage to get the box constructed and installed. Once I had the frame in place and nailed in tight Mr Rainman decided that I needed to use squirt in foam around the window to get a good seal. We are out of optimum usage temperatures but I did it anyway. This meant it was going to take forever to dry. We ended up plugging in a heater and closing up the room.

The black walnut tree I went and picked up this summer got cut up into lumber today. Mr Rainman and I went over and picked it up. There was more wood there than I realized when we dropped off the tree. Unfortunately, there was not room in the old chicken coop for the wood to dry out there. We ended up putting it in the barn! This meant that we could not set it up so that we could band the boards together. We got it all snickered and laid out flat and tomorrow we will pull down some of the long boards stored in the barn and pile them on top of the walnut. I figure a few hundred pounds of weight on top of the pile should help keep everything straightened out. All of the boards are cut to 1.5” thick.

They took the pickup home with them and hopefully will come out tomorrow with an excavator. I want to get the new ditch in field #1 finished before the ground freezes hard. Mr BeardMePlease will be cutting up all of the fallen tree branches in our yard and cleaning up the yard. Once that is done then the back bridge to the wood shed can be cut up so it doesn’t get washed away in the spring rains. I will reinstall it after the spring runoff. Hopefully, we can get the East wall done in the office and the second window installed.

The puppy, Chance, looks cute but she can be a terror. We are still working on potty training her. She has not been easy.

Back at the office

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I really need to finish finish reinforcing the berm and digging a secondary ditch in field #1. It has been cold and now the rain is coming again. Instead I am going to focus back on the office! We had company come for Thanksgiving. So our old office is back to being a bedroom until after the holidays now with people coming and going. This means if I want to get the office stuff out of our bedroom then I need to finish the office! Mind you the office was only supposed to take a couple of months so we didn’t really organize the old clean out of the in house space and just moved it all into our master bedroom. This was a mere six months ago, minuscule on the house remodeling time scale, but still annoying. So Doom helped me out in the office on Friday. I messed up big time when I started that wall. I am installing tongue and groove and you always want to start at the ceiling and work down! Do not violate this rule. I for some unknown now reason did violate the aforementioned rule. This meant I needed to cross the door in the middle of the room. I have not idea what I was thinking when I did it! I have managed to cuss myself out several times in an attempt to fix my blunder. You know it’s bad when you have to cuss the previous contractor/remodeler and its you. Nothing is level or square, the house is at least 120 years old and only this room sits on a rock wall foundation. I have to compensate all the time. I know this, I am still dumbfounded that I made this decision. Anyways, after cussing out the noob again, Doom and I decided that the only way we were going to get the thing corrected was to just split the wall in half over the door frame. By the time I trim out the door and trim out the ceiling there will only be about two inches of the wall visible and the trim will draw your eye away from my blunder. You have to look closely at the picture to tell what we did. Sometimes it is all about being able to cover up or handle the oddities that an old house presents. I was working on the trim near the machine work room I made and the wall is so crooked that I had to lean the board up, and just trace the angle. I used the table saw to just follow the line. Without a tape measure your eye really does not notice the one inch difference, because the line is straight. I have learned that if I can look at something, figure out how to accommodate it and after install step back and it looks good/normal then the technique I used to cover up the oddity worked. Since I am installing wood with color variations and defects that helps a ton also.

The feeder sheep have finally decided they may need to actually come in and eat some hay. They have been out free ranging on the hillsides and bottoms and have not wanted any supplemental feed. Even the three bulls will go out and free range during the day. I don’t worry too much about the sheep not being able to get to the feed. They always find a way.

I got another raccoon. It had been living in the barn but it has been mighty cagey. So the count for the year is Predators 15, Farm 6. The predators are winning. I got six adult chickens online. I think one is a rooster! It was not obvious when I brought it home but it was a fairly juvenile bird. I am going to give it another month. If its a rooster then I will keep it and kill my old rooster. He is not accepting the latest batch of chickens. He gets a fungus on his feet and makes them look all weird. Sarah looked it up and it is a delicacy in some countries. The coyotes can have him from the bone pile. We are only getting 1-2 eggs a day now. I thought it was the raccoon, then the lack of light, but now I am unsure why no one is laying in the henhouse. So I am looking for another dozen laying or soon to be laying chickens. We have just enough eggs for us, no one else.

We were watching a movie last night. Our daughter took this picture of me highly engrossed in the captivating film. Putting up Christmas decorations just tuckered me out.

Really, we are almost winterized

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Last weekend I was very productive! I am still in winterizing mode and there is still plenty left to do. On Friday last week, I cleaned out the machine shed to make room for both tractors. I need to be able to park them out of the weather. Annmarie, let me know we needed to get the lavender trimmed up, another winterizing chore. I broke out the new DeWalt battery hedge trimmer and started in on the task. This turned out to be a little more difficult than I imagined. The lavender had shoots super low and I had to lift them up to cut them and the huge tree keeps dropping small branches into the lavender making it necessary to clean out the lavender bunch before trimming. I only got half the patch done before it got super cold and for sanity reasons I needed to go back into the house.

On Saturday it was cold, very cold. I put on neck warmer, wool shirt, carhart insulated bibs stocking cap and thick insulated gloves. I wanted something warm to drink, my go to drink is coffee. Coffee is the perfect drink and solves most of what ills a person. I was in a hurry and ended up just boiling some water and throwing a tea bag into the thermos. I wanted to get out and finish the ditch up in field #1. I keep trying to get it finished before we get a hard freeze. I was able to get another 200 feet dug up, reinforced. I found a 20 foot section of the embankment that had been washed out in the last flood. It took quite a while to get this section built back up. It was cold, so I broke out the hot tea. Yeah, it’s tea, simply not a substitute for coffee. I only tried it a couple more times out of thermoregulatory needs, it was cold! The oddest and best part of the day was that my coat smelled amazing. The lavender I had cleaned up and removed from the patch ended up rubbing some lavender oil on my coat and when the wind let off or I had to wipe my nose I could smell the lavender. It made for a nice surprise.

Sunday I decided to start feeding the cows out of our overflow hay in the corral. Each bale weighs around 40# and I fed 16 bales to the upper cows and 16 to the lower cows. I can get 8 on the tractor at a time. I have learned to cut off the net wrapping before I load them onto the tractor so I can just drive them out and dump them off. Its way faster this way and I can contain the wrap. This year I have started putting a bag of used wrap in the trash can weekly. I don’t want to have a huge pile by the spring. I went back to the lavender patch and got it all trimmed up. I pulled weeds and raked the entire patch. The only thing left in the garden to do is to trim the raspberries. I pulled out the prime rib from the freezer. We are going to have it for Thanksgiving