farm life

Lambing has begun!

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We knew the sheep were due to have lambs very soon so we started to lock them up at night four days ago. This morning we had our first set of twins! The Gingerman and daughter went out to check on the sheep and discovered the pair. They went into a jug and were fed and watered. Sarah asked me about feed for the momma. We usually supplement their hay with some grain or sheep feed to increase the number of calories the nursing mommas are getting. I didn’t have any out in the barn. So I added it to my list of items to get accomplished today. The Gingerman had brought down another six bags of garbanzo beans so I decided to grind up a few bags to feed to the mothers. I brought the tractor around with a few old protein lick tubs and proceeded to mix feed as it went into the grinder.

I only had one stoppage while grinding this time. I think one of the wires is loose in the on/off switch but I managed to get it going again without tearing it apart. I ground about 200# of feed for the sheep. I have two full metal trash cans of feed already ground for the chickens and at this point I need to get some more metal 55 gallon drums to store feed in the chicken coop. I will need to start moving the cracked seed out into the barn into the large metal feed container. It will hold over 1000#. At this point I am still pretty focused on the bathroom so I will only be cracking grain when I need it for the sheep. I am hopeful this cracked batch will get us to the weekend. The grain containers don’t have covers but I am hoping the raccoon will leave it alone. We will see.

I went into the barn and set up the momma/baby area. Put out feed, opened up the side fence so they can get to water. I put a brand new protein lick tubs outside and pulled a panel over the gate so that no one can get out. We are now ready for the mommas/babies when they are bumped out of the jugs and into their own area.

The sheep snuck by the tractor when I was grinding grain so I had to battle them most of the time. I finally ended up opening up the gates so they could go up onto the back hillside. The grass is a couple of inches tall so they can get some fresh green grass into their diet. We are still filling all of the feeders in the barn also. We won’t stop that for a while. I am hopeful lambing season will go quickly. There were three rams in the pasture for breeding so we are hopeful they all tried to outcompete each other!

Bathroom day 31

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Well, only counting days I am actually working on the bathroom is making my timeline look better than it is. I had to spend most of Friday doing the farm taxes. Actually, I don’t do the taxes. I do the receipts. I have to sort through a year’s worth of receipts and categorize them into about twenty different categories. I then have to go through and see how much money we made off of the various farm income streams. We usually spend more money than we make but every year we make a little more than the previous year. This task is fairly onerous but I pretty much refuse all efforts to get me to do it on a monthly basis. I just pile the receipts into a drawer and know that it will take me eight hours to total and itemize receipts for an annual accounting.

Saturday Mr Rainman came out and we finished up the installing the last of the tile. All of the tile is officially laid/installed on the walls/floors. Now we will need to ensure all of the grout lines are clear and ready for grout. We will wash the tiles a few times to get any residue of mud off of them. The grout is 100% epoxy based and only has a work time of 80 minutes. We are going to start on the tile walls in the main part of the bathroom. The walls were the cabinet and vanity will be installed. These are great locations to practice technique. I will need to watch some videos on using this specific brand of grout to see if there any pearls of wisdom needed to make the job easier.

On Sunday, we cleaned out the bathroom and took all of the tools out to the old house. We also cleaned up the hallway! You can actually walk down the hallway and not get attacked by the construction mess.

It was raining quite a bit so we opted to go get the barn ready for lambs. Working inside the barn it doesn’t matter what the weather is like outside. We expect the sheep to start having lambs in the next two weeks. So we took the time to set up all of the jugs. We were able to set up eight areas for momma/lamb jugs. Once we start using them we will drop down to seven jugs. The eighth one will be where the bonded momma/lamb combos will go. As the herd of new mothers keeps growing we will slowly start to divide the barn and give them more and more room until there is a small area for the soon to be moms and the rest of the barn is for the mommas/lambs. We did not wash out all of the buckets. As we start to carry water the initial trip to the spring will include cleaning the bucket out before it is filled with fresh water. If we cleaned them out and it takes two weeks for babies we would have to clean them out again so this way we only do it once. We are going to have to start locking the sheep up every night. This makes finding lambs much easier in the morning.

Bathroom day 29

Steve Hardin1 Comment

I have started to change how I am counting days on the bathroom remodel. I am now only counting the days when I work on the bathroom. Otherwise, the days I worked at the paying job would count against me. Now mind you, the project is going so well that I had to set up a portable shower in the mud room on Saturday night and on Sunday morning I had to make some modifications so it would drain correctly. Annmarie will now be able to take a shower whenever she wants which’s is typically at 0430. This is especially important since she is super busy during Lent. I was told that if I had started the project in January I would have gotten an extra month! I was not ready for it in January. At this point, I am not sure I really was ready for it at all.

Mr Rainman and I have been plugging away at it when I can get away from work. I was able to get home early one day last week but I had to go in at 0400 two other days to ensure I got all of my work completed. We have discovered that precutting most of the tile before we mix the All-set is the best way to get tiling done in a timely manner. I had measured and started to cut 76 tiles for the niche narrow walls but when we went to insert the niche it was discovered that I had not accounted for the metal trim and we needed to cut off another 1/4” of tile for them to fit. Mr Rainman cut tiles as fast as he could while I tried to get the shelf installed correctly. We managed to get one niche installed today. There are times the two of us bicker like old ladies. We cannot tell what the other one wants. Usually he cannot tell what I am saying. We get it figured out eventually.

Unfortunately, it is not all tile work. Mr Rainman went up and shut the gates to field 2 and fed the sheep this morning while I fixed the portable shower. He also took bodies to the boneyard. He did say that every rose bush all the way up to the triangle had a small covey of quail in it. They are starting to separate and find breeding partners. We have a lot of pheasants left over from the winter. If spring cooperates with the laying cycles then we will have a lot of game birds this fall. We also have isolated the sheep to the barn lot, ram pasture and area around the old chicken coop. They should start having lambs in the next 2-3 weeks and we want to be able to find them. Once they start birthing we will be locking them up in the barn at night. It makes it a whole lot easier to find and deal with the babies when they are all in the barn. We may need to make jugs next week in the barn so we are ready for the lambs.

Annmarie and I did a thing this week. We bought the other half of the farm from her aunt, Beverly on Thursday. It will take us about ten years to pay it off. We did the math and it will never make enough to pay itself off in our lifetime, it would take 30+ years to pay itself off. We bought it so the farm could eventually be put back together. This is something we have wanted to do for a long time and are fortunate to be able to afford it. Our only real focus on it will be to eradicate some star thistle. Eventually, we will need to repair some fencing.

The baby chickens keep trying to die. I have been having to go out every night and toss the chickens in the door. They keep getting locked out of the coop. I have had to toss in as many as 20 chickens a night. The last few nights the numbers have been steadily decreasing and they are mostly the babies. Tonight when I went out there were none outside! They had all made it inside before the auto chicken door closed. There is hope for them yet. I just need to see how many are hens and how many are roosters now. I should be able to tell in the next 1-2 months. I am going to keep one of the roosters.

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 remodel day 23

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Well it seems like day 22 and 23 just came and went with hardly any progress. On day 22 we finished tiling the third wall in the main part of the bathroom. That entire back corner will be hidden behind a custom cabinet that will be built after the bathroom is functional. We had a lot of mud left to use but I needed to get to Hermiston to pickup our shower pan that had just come into the store. We have been waiting for two weeks to get this last essential piece of the Schluter. So I picked up several other pieces of metal trim, some All-set, mortar bags, gloves, and more Kerdi-tape to seal the pan to the wall. I had to stop at two different stores to find everything I needed. Home Depot does not carry disposable bags that will slide into the mortar bag. We are using a 100% epoxy grout and it will destroy a grout bag every time we use it. I ended up having to order some online and have them shipped to the house. I suspect they will arrive before we will need them.

So Day 23 was going to be the day we finally catch up and can just hammer out the rest of the project. All we had to do was some plumbing, cut the shower pan and then set it all. Once it was set I would almost be done with the Schluter system, it would just be tiling.

Mr Rainman and I found all the tools and parts, drilled a hole in the floor for the drain. We forgot to mark the Schluter when it was installed so we knew where the drain was in the floor. We went back to old pictures and calculated 15.5” from the wall. I failed to account for the fact that I had to put 2×6 boards behind the long wall due to the brick chimney being there. The hole was off by 2.5”, it was too far to the right. This actually ended up working in our favor as we were able to cut the original piping and replumb to get it to fit. We dry fitted the pieces. We glued it all back together and it looked great. I was the one who had to crawl under the house.

Now it was shower pan time so we watched a couple of videos, cut the pan to size and then Mr Rainman says, “shouldn’t we have used mud on the drain like the picture?”. Well yes, we should have and I don’t have any more spare ABS fittings to fix the mistake and we cannot install the drain pan without the plumbing fixtures. Mr Rainman had to leave fairly early and I cannot mud the drain then crawl under the house and get it all assembled. It does require one in the bathroom and one under the house.

So instead of plumbing I cut the bottom tiles for the course we set the day before and called the wife. There have been some unforeseen delays and a few redos but the bottom line is my time estimate is off by at least 2-3 weeks. I am out of PTO and I have to get back to the paying job. Lent is coming up soon and the wife is gone and busy almost the entire Lent season every evening. She was looking forward to having a shower in our own home. We are the new proud owners of a pop up shower that attaches to the deep sink in the laundry room. It should be here next week. I am pretty sure I can set it up in the laundry room, if not it can go in the mud room. The drain is a garden hose that just goes out the back door. Now, this being said it does not slow down progress or mean that the completion date can be pushed out further. It is just a convenience.

So now the race is on to get it done within the new timeframe and not need to push out that timeframe again. Time will tell.