chickens

Bathroom remodel day 26

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Well my vacation is over and the bathroom is not completed. I am sure that I am not the only man in history to utter those words. Wow, this has been a large complicated project. There have been more than a few setbacks but we are still moving forward. I was feeling so good about progress that I bet the wife that by two weeks from today we will be able to use the bathroom. This may have been premature as I figured out two more setbacks today.

Mr Rainman and I have been going at it every day for the last three days. I have been drinking nothing but coffee for days and not very much of that. So much so that last night my legs spent all night cramping up. Today I decided to up my water intake game and drank almost an entire container of V8 juice and spiking the glasses of V8 with liquid IV powder to give it more kick! The V8 hides most of the taste but I would like to sleep tonight so I am sticking with it. The shower walls are still not perfectly square so that has caused us some problems getting the tiles installed. The predone tiles stuck on a 12×12” mesh has caused us some difficulties. The gaps between tiles is sometimes way off and we have to try and move them around. It’s painful as you usually have to cut the mesh.

The All-set we are only mixing in 1/4 bag batches. Mr Rainman has been weighing it out and measuring all of the water. If the batch is too thick we lose working time (bucket time) and then have to waste it after a couple of hours. It has been taking me about three hours to use up a 1/4 of a bag of All-set. I am not the Flash. That is a lot of mixing and cleanup over the last few days.

The goal is to go into work early so I can leave early and get some more bathroom work done. We will see how this process goes.

Today we figured out that our metal tile trim will not work inside the shower. That tile is thinner than the tile we bought the trim for so it is too big. I will need to go over to Hermiston and trade it out for a smaller size. We also had the niches back wall completed when I realized there were no shelves installed. I had to do a search on Google and figure out that I should have cut the tile on the back wall to accommodate the shelf. We were able to tear out the tile, take it outside and wash the All-set off and then scrape the wall of the niches dry. After I get the new metal trim we will by dry fitting the entire niche before we even mix any mud up to ensure everything fits perfectly. To make this easier I got the boss to agree to another design change. We will be using our 2×6” tiles horizontally stacked so we can cut each one individually and make the outer edge of the niche clean and even.

The Gingerman was out over the weekend and he put together our new grain cracker/grinder and managed to mill about 100# of grain in 15-20 minutes. It works very well. So we will work on cracking the whole grain we are getting so it can be stored that way. In the spring, once it warms up we can just put the grain in a five gallon bucket and let it sprout, then toss it to the chickens.

Mr Rainman put up our new salt tasting center for the sheep. We found a place online that sells about 25 different mineral concentrations for goats/sheep. The idea is that the animals will eat what they need and by paying attention to it you will know what they are short on in their diet. He put this up a few days ago and I spotted the sheep in the back barn lot eating their type of salt. In a week or two we will look and see what type they are eating. Annmarie made labels engraved onto metal plates that we attached above the bins. This way we know exactly what is in each bin.

Bathroom Day 19 remodel

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well the weekend was well spent, the bathroom is almost ready for tile. We just have to install the two membranes in the shower around the nozzle and the handle then seal the Detra membrane seam and Detra to the wall. The shower pan is still pending arrival by this Wednesday. It should not be a holdup for us as we can do the main bathroom floor and then the main bathroom walls first. If the pan is still not here after we get those tiled then we will grout them all next.

I just need to keep making progress every day. It took two days to get all of the holes and seams sealed correctly to provide that waterproofing that Schluter guarantees. I did not realize how long it was going to take. Mr Rainman asked me if I had read the reviews or not on the Schluter products and I said no. I knew it would do what I wanted but did not want to know about the reviews. He said one of the biggest complaints was on how long the system took to install by people not professionals. After getting this far I would say those reviews are spot on!

On Saturday, the Gingerman helped me seal nail protrusions and joints all day and on Sunday Mr Rainman helped me do the same thing. It is not a fast process. The bucket time on mud is around four hours using the All-set version and this is nice as that much time is needed. The only real problem is as it thickens you cannot add water to thin it out. You have to just hit it with the mixer to smooth it out again. This only works for so long before it is too thick to work with. If we were faster this probably would not be a problem.

When we set the Detra membrane on the main floor, I told Mr Rainman it would only take us an hour. Nothing else I have provided a timeline for has turned out to be accurate and it was already 1500. He grumbled and said we would be there till 1700 at a minimum. He mixed up 1/4 bag of All-set and I cut the Detra membrane to size so that it would fit. We got the entire floor covered with two sections. It only took us about 15 minutes once we had the All-set cured and ready to go. It did take the entire bucket of All-set. If we had another 1 square feet of membrane to apply we would not have had enough to cover the floor.

This gave us time to go out and try and catch one of the alpaca, Mad Max as the idiot had a piece of baling twine dangling from his neck and dragging on the ground. Annmarie had noticed it the day before. I figured we could just show up with treats and they would come running up to us, we could grab him and then be done. Nope, they did not want to cooperate. After multiple failed attempts to grab the needed alpaca by the head or hold onto the twine trailing it we ended up having to push Mad Max and Snoop into the orchard and shut them away from everyone else. This now resulted in us chasing two alpaca around, after several failed attempts and one resulting in me getting dragged across the ground as I attempted to hold onto his foot while being dragged, we opted to open up the gate into the back alley way hoping to get them both into a smaller space so we could catch Mad Max. Mr Rainman went to open the gate and I followed them to gate leading out of the field. It was closed but they both knew it was the desired escape route, it just needed to open for them to have what they wanted.

As I was approaching them, Snoop decided to start picking on Mad Max, this unintentionally forced Mad Max into the fence and I went onto the open side of him. Snoop was blocking the other side and Mr Rainman was able to sneak up on Snoop’s side and grab Mad Max by the neck. I just had to slide the twine over his neck and we were all done! Mr Rainman was out the door with everything done by 1620!

Our grain cracker came a week ago but we are going to have to get it set up. The Gingerman is getting grain from truck clean outs and it is a mixture of everything. The chickens don’t like entire pieces of corn, wheat, barley, or peas. So we will need to crack them so they can be eaten. If the bags are a little wet I put them out for the sheep and they do not care in what shape the grain is, they will eat it. We have a lot of storage space available currently but I plan on getting four more metal 50 gallon drums to put in the back of the chicken coop. The drums will hold about 200# of grain/drum. I have enough room in the back of the coop to hold five drums and then there is a the grain storage out in the barn. The barn storage can hold at least 2000# maybe more.

Chicken tracker 2023

Steve HardinLeave a comment

We averaged 19.8 laying hens for the year and currently have 31 hens. We collected on average 4.4 eggs/day for a lousy production rate of 24.3%! Definitely my worst production rate ever. Our monthly feed weight was 168#/month at a cost of $62.54/month. The crazy part is our feed cost was 47 cents/egg or $6.95/dozen. Our total cost for the year was $7.28/dozen eggs. We sold them for $5/dozen. We ended up losing $344 on the chickens last year. Now mind you, every time the weather goes crazy or a raccoon showed up the chickens refused to lay eggs.

In an effort to try and keep hens from feeding the predators we added a second solar chicken door to the chicken yard. During the summer there are usually a couple of slow pokes who don’t make it to the coop before the door shuts. They sit outside the door all night and end up feeding the raccoons. Now I know there are two raccoons around the farm as I just shot at them this month. We purchased enough chicken wire to to put a lid on the chicken yard. This way the slow pokes will be protected from dying and will only be terrorized by the raccoons trying to get at them. We got the overhead supports in but the wire has not been laid out yet and stapled in place.

Bottom line, with the increase in feed prices I am going to have to raise the price. On the plus side, I am getting eggs more often and that is helping. Plus, if we can keep the chickens alive they will lay eggs. It seems like a simple concept but quite hard to execute. So the price will be going to $6/dozen. I am hopeful that with the second chicken door and the overhead wire it will make all the difference and volume will offset the feed price. We were very good this last year about keeping all of the feed receipts which is helping forecast a factual based cost not one arbitrarily chosen.

Flooded bathroom

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It all started out so innocently. I needed to water my upstairs plants and finish planting my starts for Christmas presents. This meant that I needed to plug in my expandable water hose for watering the breeze porch. Now I had a kerfuffle a couple of weeks ago and the hose leaked causing a significant amount of water to leak out onto the floor. It took me four shower towels to absorb it all and clean up the mess. This time I worked on repotting plants and watering all of my plants and totally ignoring my hose connection in the bathroom. Forty five minutes after I started working on the porch I finished and went into the bathroom to shut off the water. Yep, I should have checked the water in the first five minutes of using it. It took me seven towels (all the unused ones we had left in the cupboard), two rugs and two hand towels to get all of the water cleaned up. There was so much water I had to get a garbage sack to hold the towels so I could carry them down to the washing machine without making a water mess all through the house. On the plus side, when we installed the upstairs bathroom tile floor we used a waterproofing paint on treatment and then used a pool synthetic grout to create a space that would hold water in case the toilet overflowed. Well the toilet has not overflowed a single time but I have flooded the room twice so far.

I fired up the washing machine and about 20 minutes later the machine started to make funny noises. We have been having some issues with the machine not being evenly balanced when it spins. I have been sitting on the machine when it spins to counteract this effect. So as I am sitting on the washing machine I notice the sound getting louder and a weird smell emanating from the machine, almost a burnt smell. The washer died about five minutes later. Of course the machine is half full of water and soap. I fished out the towels and placed them outside over our fence. My hope was they would lose about half the water out of them before they froze solid. So now we have no washing machine. I will call for a repair on Monday but with the holidays I am sure there will be some delay.

The heating company fixed our drain pump again. There is a new condensate pump and there is now a waterproof tray around the pump with a water sensor. So if the pump fails or leaks the water sensor turns off the entire heating system. I am tired of repairing the craft room ceiling after the pump leaks. I have the repair on my list for first thing next year.

Hopefully, the chicken wire will go up soon enclosing the entire chicken yard in a metal protective mesh. One could hypothesize that the area will be predator proof but there is no real such area. It will be predator resistant.

It has been cold lately and the alpaca have finally come in off the hill and are now hanging around the cars and eating on the large bale of alfalfa. Annmarie keeps treats for them in the trunk of her car so when she pulls up to the house they all come running for “alpaca cookies”.