bathroom remodel

Mowing lawn

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It’s hot in Eastern Oregon, this means everything that doesn’t have water on it all the time is dead, brown and ready to burn. Due to the coyote problem we are now feeding the sheep last years hay in the ram pasture so they cannot get out to be coyote food. We have been watering our front hillside to get the clover well established. It is loving the heat and the water. I decided it was time to let the sheep into the yard. Now after the earlier fiasco this summer with the puppy jumping the back yard fence to get in with the sheep we cannot use the back yard fence as containment anymore. So we are resigned to using the two overhead runs we have in the front yard. The runs work well but the dogs are used to tearing up the front yard and running all over usually. They don’t like the runs. Unfortunately, the sheep getting chased all over the front lawn is a bigger problem so the dogs get some run time.

The screwy part of this is that the puppy, Chance, has been doing great on the 30’ lead when working the animals. She listens, she stops, she goes left/right, rarely do you have to use the lead to stop her. She is just over 1 year old but doing very well. This lulled me into complacency. Friday I put both dogs in the back yard, opened the gate with them both laying down and then took chance by the collar while Mouse stayed down at the open gate. After Chance was on the run, I got Mouse, no problems. The sheep got to stay in all day and at dinner time I ran them out of the yard. They wanted back in at one point for an evening snack but I told them they would have to wait until the next day.

Saturday, I was feeling pretty confident. I let the sheep into the front yard and got the dogs into the back yard again. I opened the gate, both dogs were in a down position and I took Mouse first this time. I was almost to the run, 6 seconds, before Chance broke and took off after the sheep. Fifty sheep tearing up the yard is rough on standing structures, two sheep almost knocked themselves out by hitting the upright grape posts, one sheep slid across the bridge and pushed out the paneling to fall off the bridge, two smashed into the already sheep broken outside lamp. I could not call the puppy off. I was standing in front of the sheep trying to get her attention when she singled one out. She just kept after it. I finally tossed a very large branch at her along with an impressive amount of vocal discouragement. I missed her but the combination got her attention and she ran off to an empty hillside. Annmarie had heard me “discussing” the sheep issue with the dog and hollered out for her to lay down, she did. I calmed down and was able to tell her to stay and walked over to her and got her collar and walked her to the run. The hardest part is to praise her for listening. The sheep got to finish eating in peace. Last night I again used the lead and she pushed them out of the yard without incident.

Sunday morning I again let sheep into the yard and put the dogs on the run. I used a leash and took Chance first! Mouse tried to rush past me when I wasn’t looking but he will drop at command as long as he is not locked in on an animal. I got him on the run. Now here is the weird part if we leave the dogs loose they will harass the sheep incessantly. But if we put them on the run I cannot count on the dogs to keep the sheep away from my plants! The dogs will lay down, hold still and allow the sheep to come in and eat the yard around them. The dogs are not even suckering them in close. They will just lay there and let the sheep eat. It is so weird!! The puppy is on the right side of the picture and our older dog is on the far left side. Neither one is reaching for or harassing the sheep. The dogs obviously got the instructions for the leads memorized. I think, they think, they are still on a lead and are following our instructions.

Annmarie got our upstairs bathroom panels covered with cloth. She just needs to run a ribbon around the edges. We needed stronger magnets if we were going to run the fabric over the edges and over the magnets. She tried and it did not work. It looks good and the fabric was a gift from a friend who is no longer. We can look at it and remember her every day.

Smattering of oddities

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There are times when a week of little things turns out to be an amazing week of accomplishments. This is not normal but it is fulfilling mostly due to its novelty. This week was such a thing. My air plant is blooming which is a first for me! I usually have a hard time keeping them alive but this year I have managed to keep six kicking and one doing well.

On Monday, the plumber came out to look at our instant hot water propane tank. We have been getting an error code for months now that will turn off the propane so there is no hot water. We figured out that stopping the demand or limiting it minimized your chance of losing hot water. Eventually, you just needed to shower faster so the hot water did not disappear. It was at a point where it needed to be corrected. I had dug some carbon out of the exhaust but could not figure out how to get inside of the heater. The plumber tore it apart and discovered that the squirrel fan that blows the air was full of dead flies. Not only was the fan full of dead flies, there was a paste of dead flies inside the fan housing and on the sensor unit. All of that was cleaned and reassembled and the hot water heater has been amazing ever since! This is a way cheaper fix than replacing the instant tank.

Tuesday, Sarah called in the late afternoon to say that one of the sheep had been attacked and something was hanging out. I came home and walked out to the ram pasture. Yep, one of the lambs, 5 month old, had crawled through some metal and cut open its stomach. It unfortunately had knicked the bowel also so I had to put it down. Not a great outcome but it is no longer suffering. I took it up to the boneyard that day. It’s too hot to leave anything dead near the house.

Thursday, I started working on converting the 20V DeWalt charger into a 12V power supply base. I gutted the charger and then had to cut holes in the plastic for the 12V regulator to be visible. Cutting holes in plastic with the a Dremel tool resulted in a lot of melting cuts. My only current problem is the screws are not designed to go through two layers of plastic. As dusty as the barn is I need the top clear piece installed. I will have to go to the hardware store and see if I can find longer bolts. The only thing left is to remove the solder from the battery terminals so I can solder on new ones to convert the battery to a power supply. I just need to finish that last piece and then I can mount it in the barn and start wiring the barn for 12V LED light strings. I am going to have five strings and they will be controlled from a switch bank next to the battery. I also picked up three Banty hens from a neighbor who died recently. We agreed to take care of them.

Friday, Annmarie called about a new pellet grill she had found for 50% off. Most people have already purchased their summer grill and ours had just died last week. So we got it strapped down into the back of the pickup and Annmarie told me to just use the tractor and a pallet to move it around.

Saturday, I cleaned off the back porch and pulled out the dead grill. Once I had a spot cleaned I got the tractor and pallet level with the tailgate and rolled the grill onto the pallet, strapped it down and brought it around to the side yard. I was able to roll it right up to the back porch. There was some finagling to get it up the three stairs by myself but I got it done without dumping the grill over on its side. I then had to start it up and do a 30 minute burn to clean it all out. I tossed the old grill in the trash. We had a 1.5 yard dumpster delivered this week and I filled it up from the net wrap in the barn. I have the big barn cleaned out and have started in on emptying the lamb shed but I ran out of room. I was also able to find the skirting table that had gotten stashed out in the old chicken coop. I had been looking for the thing all week and that was literally the only place left to look.

Sunday, I set up two leg traps in my mother-in-law’s front yard for raccoons. She has several coming up to the front porch now to eat cat food. So we will see how the traps perform. I cannot have them come up to the house and start snacking on our chickens. I set up the skirting table in the yard so that Annmarie can wash alpaca fiber and lay it out to dry. I also cleaned the main windows downstairs inside and out. I like looking out them. It’s really too hot to be outside for any length of time. So I went upstairs and glued on all the magnets for our fabric frames to cover up the storage closet. We should be able to start working on those this week.

All in all it was a lot of things that got marked off the to do list and I am happy.

Upstairs bathroom might get finished

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I keep focusing on the upstairs bathroom. I want to get it 100% complete. I had purchased a special Kreg Tool jig to allow me to drill holes on an angle and screw boards end to end. It’s a quick and dirty way to join pieces, much faster than any type of glued joinery. Since we are covering the panels with fabric, it was merely a requirement to build a sturdy frame. The Kreg jig worked like a charm. I even did very well cutting all my pieces the same size. I had the whole thing assembled and then tried to clamp them up in place to drill the pilot holes so I could then install the magnets. Nope, I did not do something right. Turns out I used the wrong inner pieces on two different squares. I had to take them apart, thank goodness for screws, and put the proper pieces back together.

Once I had them all clamped in place then I drilled through each one with a 1/8” drill so that I could line up the magnet on the panels with the face of the closet. I used a 1/2” Forstner drill to get a nice hole to glue the magnet into. I have magnets that will hold 20# and I am using at least four on every panel and six on the larger panels. They should stay in place without any trouble. The hardest part is getting the magnets lined up so they attract each other and not push away! I managed to line up the first panel but almost messed up the magnet direction twice. I decided that since every panel is unique and has holes drilled in different spots I needed to be more careful in my magnet application. I only did one panel and am going to do one panel every night until I get them all finished. I cannot have 3-6 of them all drying at the same time and then try and put them back up on the wall. Our new electric stapler came this week so as soon as the spare staples come we will be ready to go if I can get them all set this week.

Annmarie went out and fed the bees today. They made it through the winter! I saw one fly out of the hive yesterday when it got over 50 degrees. She did not put on her bee suit and open it up. It is still not warm enough yet to expose them to the cold. We are going to get one more hive. We have no plans to go past two.

I have been trying to get one of my plants on the breeze porch to crawl across the ceiling. I built a trellis that hangs from the ceiling. It covers a space about four feet wide and five foot long. The plant has started to die, I think I am overwatering it. So I got a new pot for my large jade plant, about 2×3’ and am going to use my old jade pot for the crawling plant. That pot has a hole in the bottom and can drain all of the extra water. I hope that is the problem. The jade should be good in its new pot for another 5-7 years. I would like to get a five foot jade tree grown before I die. It is not easy and it takes a long time. I have been at it almost 10 years already. It might grow faster if I was nicer to it but I like my plants hardy. Plus I keep cutting it and trimming it to the shape I want. I am working on my staff Christmas presents already this year. I usually start splitting and repotting in Sept/October. I have 12 African violet starts going now. This batch is for me, I want to fill up my shelves again. Once I have the shelves full I will make a set for the staff. They are pretty slow growing so it will take a few months to get them up to any size.

Minutiae abounds

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It’s been a long week and it Mother Nature cannot decide what she wants to do. It was clear and warming up at the beginning of the week, now there is snow on the ground and snowing again, we have about two inches on the ground currently. Annmarie has been using her office! I have been slowly putting little things in place. I got our old dining room table in there and we used some table elevators to lift it two inches so we could slide the smaller sorting bins under it. There are now six bins under the table. The new cable for the router came so I will be installing that soon and finishing up the corner trim to hide the cables. Gizmo has a new doggie bed, he didn’t like the old one it was too small for him he thought. Annmarie needs to start bringing out books but she is going to sort them first and thin them out. So I have resisted the temptation to remove them from our bedroom. I would like to see them thinned out also. There is a small table down at her mom’s that she wants me to retrieve and refinish. It has marker, paint and nail polish on it I think. It was from a long time ago when Sarah was a menace. She wants it to go in front of the couch.

I messed up last week and should have kept the two ewes and three lambs in the same pen I had them in when sorting them. I sorted the wrong babies but I did watch them nurse. The trouble was two days later both ewes were head butting the lambs and refusing to let them nurse. Unfortunately, in two days we ended up with three more bummers and another death. No clue why the lamb died, it may have been suffocated by its mother. We have been supplementing grain since the babies have popped out. The ewes are getting mighty skinny. We will be worming them again next week. We wanted to let them have the babies and have the babies be a little older. Last year our weight loss was due to worms. So we treated in the fall and are going to treat again in the early spring/late winter. I just need to verify we have enough medicine to treat all of the ewes.

We have been having a hard time finding bagged sheep feed. We keep looking but everyone else is looking and buying before us. I went ahead and reserved all of the lamb feed coming in this week so we can keep feeding the lambs using our creep gate. We figure if we can get the lambs to eat solid food they will take less calories away from the mothers. I worked on getting the creep gate installed in the opening of the pen under the stairs. I am not sure why we never thought of this before. I put in four eyelets and was able to attach it to one side with a metal pin. I need to get longer eyelets for the other side. I forgot it is a piece of rough cut lumber so its about 2.25” wide. My eyebolt was too short so I had to use the one inch piece next to it and tie on clips to the gate. The gate is not rigid but it does move around, about three inches, until I can get the new eyebolts installed. This movement does not seem to bother the lambs. They get in and out just fine.

I had to go in and pickup some lumber for the barn doors in the office so I grabbed enough to do the frames for the bathroom closet. I did one frame out of 1×4” boards but Annmarie thought it was too heavy. It is solid, no doubt about that. So I picked up a bunch of 1×2” boards to make new frames. I was not sure if my Kreg tool would do this thin of wood but I had no trouble drilling angled holes and assembling the frame with screws. I had to install three pieces on the front of the doors to attach magnets. Once I get all of the frames built I will need to cover up the outer edges of the closet with blue tape and then clamp each frame in place and drill a small hole through the frame and into the closet opening. This will mark my spot to drill the sink holes for the magnets that need to be installed on each side. The blue tape will help protect the wood and let me draw on the frame to mark their proper location.

Staycation 29% completed

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Well the Staycation is going well. I am getting stuff done but as always it seems to take forever. This is why men don’t like to finish stuff. The last 10% of a job takes up about 30% of the total time so it feels like you are just not getting stuff done! Take the door stripping for instance. I had to set up a work area where it is a temperature controlled environment. I had to then apply the first coat of stripper, wait about 16 hours then scrape it clean. I then had to reapply the stripper, wait for another 18 hours and then scrape it off, scrape all of the paint off with plastic scraper, brass brush and pickup all the goop off of the door. A pocket knife was required to clean the rounded edges and corners. I also had poor removal on the edges of the door so a pocket knife was utilized liberally to clean it up. I then used paper towels to get all of the gunk off the door then used mineral spirits to do the final cleanup on the door, wait another day for door to dry out. Now it is ready for some light stain and a coat of sealant. I have been staring at the door frame which of course has paint on it also. I am thinking about just taping and plastic and rags on ground then applying paint stripper. I have a paste so it should hold well but it is going to smell and be messy. Using the breeze porch I have windows open and we have the upstairs bathroom fan on for any little smell that gets inside the house. If I do the doorway it is going to smell, I do use the citrus based stuff and that has the least offensive smell. This requires a plan consult with the wife to see what she wants to do and what she will tolerate to get it. All of this takes time, I bet we have about $50 in supplies and about 7 hours into it. The problem is the doors are original to the farm so they are not getting replaced and they are solid wood five panel doors, with the current price of wood, building materials and old style door knobs I would bet all of it combined would cost about $1k/door. So I will be taking down each door one at a time and stripping them. I am not buying six new doors. Those doors will have no character! Annmarie will be making a plaque of the weird instructions that were written on the back of the door. We still don’t know what they are for or the exact location. I think it is for the septic tank location but the directions are pretty convoluted for something that is just off the front porch. Once I have the door reinstalled we will mount the handwritten instructions that she burns onto a wood plaque in the same location they were prior to the door reclamation.

I have been looking at the stuff that needs done outside but it just keeps raining every 2-3 days. We have had 42/100” of rain the last seven days and have had 1.2” for the month of March so far. So it never quite dries out enough to do anything. I did manage to drag the driveway yesterday for about 90 minutes. I was looking at it today, after multiple cars have driven on it and I will need to drag it again for about 120 minutes and I need to tear up the first 2-3” of it to really work the pot holes out and to get it so it will be smooth. What I really need is a roller! I laugh every time I say that, there is always something I don’t have but honestly, I have exactly what is minimally necessary to do everything I could want on the farm, the rest would be extraneous but helpful. The last big purchase was the snow plow. I realize it may seem extravagant but getting trapped in by the snow is no fun. Using the blade I could just make a run up and down the driveway 1-3 times during the storm and would not have to mess with huge mounds of snow at the end of the storm.

We have been working on a plan to find a home for the chest I bought. I violated the ”must have a spot first” rule we have on furniture buying. So we decided on moving out the TV stand/cabinet that we never really use except for the horizontal surface. To do that we needed a high shelf to put the router/wireless transmitter on. We decided that higher was better to increase our wireless signal inside the house. I have been working on a live edge shelf for that for two days. I am using the maple we have and of course it has a bow in the wood and it’s maple. I would rather work with black walnut. I of course do not have a planer set up and now I am going to convert the shop area into an office and not a wood shop so I have a 240V 16” planer and 8” 240V edger for sale. Neither of which have ever been ran because I never wired up a 240V plug. But that is a longer story and ends with ”I needed it”, all wives will understand. This caused me to use a hand sander, for a long time. I would have used my big hand belt sander but alas, I could not find it. I should probably add clean up the old house to my list of chores while on staycation but I need to get things done inside the house first. Again, anything is possible with 40 grit sandpaper and lots of time. I got so tired of sanding I actually removed the rust from a large hand planer and sharped the blade on a stone and used it to cut down some of the material. It was faster than the sander. The sanding took me about 4-5 hours to make one small shelf and my hand grip was so shot that I had a hard time holding a pen afterwards. Again, I am on staycation so time is an easy commodity to spend and fairly cheap at this point. Once the old TV stand is moved out to the old house, which really needs cleaned out now, then there will be a spot for the new trunk I just bought!!

I have yet to take a nap. I do feel that at least one nap is necessary for this to truly be called a staycation but I have not figured out how to squeeze it in yet. The dogs are annoying me as they keep running around the side of the house and eating the cat food. I need that fence installed in the side yard to stop them. But since the area is not yet finished I need to install a six foot gate so I can still drive the tractor through. The faucet near the tree we cut down has a leak so that means digging a 3×4 foot hole four feet deep and it will make a mess. I am waiting on warmer weather for that endeavor. I have seen some nice hammocks for sale on the internet and they do look very appealing. In five years you will be able to tie onto the power pole and the tree in our front yard, although as I type that out it doesn’t sound like that great of an idea.

We are down to 28 chickens, I just counted yesterday. I have had a few die so I do a recount every few months to make sure I can enter the correct numbers into my chicken spreadsheet. I will be doing the 2021 numbers soon. I need them for tax purposes. I am still selling eggs for $4/doz but the price of feed has not jumped yet. Once it jumps I will have to go to $5/doz to cover feed expenses. If I actually wanted to make any real money other than free eggs I would need to sell them for about $8/dozen, at that price I might make $1000/year.

I have been doing a few things, I mowed the lawn with the sheep! Our old alpaca got in on the action also, he wanted out a couple of hours later. The bunny is back or most likely is now active enough I can see him almost every day. So far the owls have not managed to eat it. We have a bald eagle that now flies by the house every few days. I have seen it repeatedly, it is no longer a one off. We get them occasionally as they are passing through but this one is staying somewhere. I have even started seeing the rock chucks out on the hillside. They have not been consistent enough to start trying to shoot them yet but as it warms up they will start spending more time outside. They are tearing up my rock cribs by digging underneath them so they need to go. The quail will hopefully multiply, they are running around everywhere and I think we managed to get at least 80 though the winter so hopefully that means we can have a few hundred this fall!