front porch

Gazebo progress

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After we sorted cows we worked on getting the 1/4 round trim installed on the porch. I made a mistake and only bought ten pieces 10” trim to cover 78’ of trim. This may sound like a lot of extra but it was going to take one piece for each end (2) and four for each long side (8) for a grand total of no extra pieces! I have never installed 1/4 round overhead before but knew there was going to be something special about it. I cut the first end piece and installed it without any difficulty and went to cut the adjoining 90 degree piece and could not get a match despite cutting it six times! I was trying to cut a 45 degree miter with another 45 degree slant. I had it all so screwed up I could not figure it out. I knew I had to quit guessing or I was going to run out of wood. So we watched a YouTube video. You have to use the wall side against the fence and then cut a 45 degree cut. Once I did this I was able to cut all of the pieces and reuse my short piece to get the trim completed. We had to use the router on the trim to get around a metal connector and on a separate piece two nails stuck in the overhead that cannot be removed. The blue color on the porch ceiling really turned out nice and the blue trim really made it snap! The only thing left is to clean off the porch, scrub it down with cleaner and get the furniture back on the deck.

Mr Rainman was able to finally get the dirt/gravel pad all compacted down nicely so we could start figuring out where to place the grain bin/gazebo. I started setting up the first row of walls to get a decent orientation on how it was going to fit. Once I had it bolted together then Annmarie and I went out and we discussed where the support beams would be located and how much of the walls I was going to remove to create an open type building. It turns out that it takes six panels to make a full circle. We are going to take out two panels on one side to create the entrance. They only sent us enough panels to go three high but that is only eight feet high and they told us we had enough panels to go ten feet high. So to compensate we are going to take the four panels from the opening and raise up the other four panels another 32”! This will get us 10’ 8” instead but that will give us enough clearing above the posts to bolt in the ceiling.

I had to order a case of 4” structural bolts so we could attach the panels to the wooden posts. We are going to install 6×6” posts on steel supports that are embedded in concrete pillars. Each post assembly costs around $100. I thought it was the wood until I looked at the receipt today, the stainless steel supports that go into the concrete are $65/each. Once I had the first ring assembled I marked the post holes and placement with some paint then we took down the walls again. I had converted the little John Deere over to a post hole auger. We drilled a 6” hole first then once all six of those were done we came back over them with the 12” auger. I managed to snap two shear bolts on the 12” auger. We kept hitting buried metal, large rocks and large tree roots.

Tomorrow, Mr Rainman will reassemble the first layer of the gazebo so he can start pouring the concrete piers. Hopefully, he can get all the piers poured but I am unsure if it can be done in a single day.

The grass is getting very high on the front hillside. We are going to let the alpaca nibble on it and see if they can make a dent.

Front porch now 96% done

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Annmarie has been working on washing and cleaning the alpaca fleece. She uses a bin and some fabric netting. She has washed this single fleece four times and each time she pulls it out of the water the organic matter gets physically picked out. After four times, actual progress is being made. It will have taken a solid 48 hours to get the fleece dry. Annmarie wants to dry this one before she starts in on a second one. She has some medieval looking device that is full of nails that is supposed to align the fibers and help pull out the rest of the organic matter. Getting the fibers all lined up will make a huge difference. Just being clean has made a huge difference. She will sort it directly into a vacuum bag and can work on spinning it when its cold outside. We cover the fiber with the fine netting and fold it under, all around the edges so that the wind cannot blow it away and the birds cannot steal it for nesting material.

Annmarie and I had been discussing my weekend project priorities all week. The alpaca are pretty high on the list but I have someone who has never helped shear coming out next weekend to assist me. It will be a hoot for them. So that is next week. I need to hammer out the fence around two sides of field one so I can turn the animals loose in there next month. This was my preferred choice. Nope, my number one task will be to fix the front porch decking. We did not get the last board screwed in correctly and it is bowed now. Unfortunately, the thought was someone would have to crawl under the porch and army crawl 40 feet through cobwebs, gravel, dirt and yellow jacks to get to the far end of the porch. The real problem is there is a special decking screw for the TREX decking and I know I have some somewhere on the farm I am just unsure where they are. So Mr Rainman and I proceeded to look for said special screws. After about 45 minutes I came to the conclusion that piling stuff in the old house for the last eight months has made a huge mess and I cannot find anything. So we started to throw away trash and put stuff away. After almost one and a half hours cleaning Mr Rainman found them on the shelf we had both already looked at. On a plus, side the old house is a lot cleaner now!

I did not really want to crawl under the porch. It had a lot of spiderwebs and a Yellowjacket nest under there. Unfortunately, the entrance is fairly small. I did not realize how small until Mr Rainman attempted to get in through the opening. I had to lay on my belly with my arms forward and crawls forward using my feet and elbows only. I was only able to move forward about two inches at a time. We had an old long handle to knock down the cobwebs so you did not have to crawl through them. They can be a little overwhelming. I was about ten feet under the porch when we realized that I could not actually scoot the board over from underneath. I had to back out two inches at a time. We were able to pry it from above and get it screwed down. There was dust and cobwebs everywhere so Mr Rainman pressure washed the entire porch and outside furniture while I went and put away tools in the machine shed.

Mr Rainman did some preventative maintenance on the John Deere tractor. We cut down all the sucker trees from the front yard and tossed them over to the sheep as a snack. We started to work on the floor in the new freezer room. I had measured and cut the new floor boards but somehow am off by a bit. The new floor is not quite level. I will need to cut a little piece for two legs of the freezer so it sits level. I am still not sure how I managed to do this. On the plus side I think I can finish the floor and maybe the siding tomorrow. Once that is done we can move the freezers into this room. They should stay a lot more clutter free this way. Once the freezers are in I will see about adding some storage shelves into the space. The space where the freezers are currently will be for the two tool boxes in my future office space. This should open the space up so it can be worked on gradually. The front porch will be done when I finish installing a door to get under the porch. Currently, it’s a crawl way with the horse mounting block stopping the dogs from getting underneath it. I will work on this also! I will, really…

Porch almost done…

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I have been working on getting the front porch done. I promised Annmarie that I would stop fencing, even though the weather is still good, to get the front porch finished. We have the stair railings and the the front porch gates still to complete. Now I did not install any of the railing, Mr Professional did so I felt like he needed to be present for the hand rails. He has been busy and unavailable but I managed to get him to come over for a few hours on Friday and Saturday. It was a good thing I waited for him. When I decided on upright 4×4 placement I did it to minimize the Trex cuts on the stair pieces. I did not know that according to the instructions you should put the support posts on the outer edge of the stairs. This is so that you can use the preset angles that Trex calculated for the stair railing 32-37 degrees. Since this little fact was overlooked for design and aesthetic reasons installing the stair railing was much more complicated than normal.

Using the template that was provided caused the railing to be too high and not match the porch railing. So we tried to alter the template. This did not result in the railings lining up. So then we tossed out the template and eye fitted the bottom railing in and marked the spots for the anchors. Once we had the bottom railing in and upright tubes in we had to cut the top railing but it was going to not fit correctly, the bottom post was too short for the angle. We had to use the Dewalt bandsaw. This is the single tool I did not want to buy this summer, and it has turned out to be essential when dealing with metal. We never could have gotten the rails cut correctly and even in place. We took the cut top rail, held it next to the poles and I used green tape to set the angle then just cut along the tape. It worked very well but it took us about eight hours to get two rails installed correctly and not cut my power cable to the two light poles as I ran the wires up the railing side. This would have been totally on me had we caught a wire. We reached down and stretched the wire tight in an attempt to move it out of the way when screwing in the railing anchors.

The gates that we are going to install are aluminum and have to measured and cut. We measured and cut them and then put them together, after tearing them apart twice we go them together correctly. The instruction sheet has eight steps and fits on one side of a normal piece of paper and has lots of pictures. They failed to tell you that the side pieces have to be held down as you predrill the holes or else the cover piece will not snap into place correctly, even if you use a file to knock it down. Also they failed to mention that you should use the silver screws that will be hidden under the trim and use the black colored ones for the corner angle pieces that are exposed. I now need to get some 3/4” black enamel sheet metal screws. So the gates are on hold until that happens.

We may have lost our bunny rabbits. We had two and have not seen a single one for over six weeks. They could have eaten hay out of the machine shed all winter so they could not die of starvation no matter how severe the weather. I think hanging around the machine shed may have been the cause of their demise as the owls like to hang out in there at night also.

Due to the amount of repairs and welding I have been doing I am going to rearrange the last bay in the machine shed. I am going to move all of the flammables away and move work benches so I can weld out of the rain inside the shop. This is a winter project. I need to finish getting the rest of the power and lights wired also. We are using the shop more and need to be able to do it in all kinds of weather.

As you can see I am hard at work raking the leaves with the same mower I use for the lawn. They have been in the yard all weekend. I put the dogs on the run and let the sheep in. The dogs don’t particularly like this arrangement and you cannot let our ankle biter dog out as Gizmo likes to ball the sheep up in a corner also. He thinks he is all tough and fails to realize that the big dogs have conditioned them to canine pressure.

Winter is close

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Well I did the welding thing again. I think the most frustrating thing about the welding is I don’t have a nice clean stash of spare metal. This is a issue that requires some more welding! I am thinking about converting a header trailer into a metal storage building. So what I do now is dig through one of three scrap metal piles until I find a few pieces of metal I think will work, clean them up with the grinder and then wire brush them. I do use a battery powered grinder (thank you DeWalt) to clean them up. Mr Professional said I needed a battery powered circular band saw (yes, it’s a DeWalt) this summer and I bought it. It is the bomb! It was so easy to cut the angle iron and flat iron pieces, and when I failed to measure the T shaped opening on the old tractor weights and welded two pieces of angle iron together that were too wide I was able to slice off an entire edge with ease. I built the supports tall enough to hold two weights at each spot, 50#/each and left room for me to drill a hole and slap a pin through so the weights cannot bounce or fall off. I was able to try it out on the driveway on Friday. It turned out very nice and the extra weight makes all the difference in getting the teeth to dig in a little instead of sitting on the surface of the dry ground. Our driveway is very smooth now! This was needed to finish dragging the last section of field #4. Once that is smooth then it can be planted. I still want to do the 1.5 acres down by where we feed the cows, I am going to call that field #5, the one across the creek #6 and then the far one #7. The orchard field, ram pasture and schoolhouse field will all have names. It must be time to make an index map again.

I spent Saturday morning working on getting our new porch pillar lights installed. This turned out to be a bigger hassle than I thought it would be considering I already had power installed under the porch. I installed a support brace behind the stairwell that makes it virtually impossible to crawl under the stairs. I was able to slip one arm and my head under and that was all. I had to install some jumpers and the 10’ extension wires I purchased which morphed into only 5’ extensions as I was incorrect in my assumption that 5’ was long enough. This caused me to have to install two more extra jumpers to build up the distance. I had to drill holes at the base of the 4×4 and then fish wires through. I installed the light sensor so it had just enough light from the sun to turn the lights off and on by photovoltaic switch. Annmarie sent me a picture after it got dark, I was at my paying job, and they worked! The only problem was when we woke up this morning the lights were off. I am hopeful that I messed up on my timer selection and that tonight when it gets dark the lights will come back on. The lights are 12v DC, and I had to dodge wasps the entire time as they were just dormant enough to hang onto the siding. I came into the house and grabbed hornet spray to kill them. The spray went down into the siding and for the next hour they kept coming out and trying to fall on me as I was working. So to expedite the process I started to smash them with the battery on the drill. I didn’t want to stick my hand or buttocks onto one that was dying but still alive enough to sting me.

While I was crawling in and out from underneath the porch I realized that there are enough blocks to complete the hypotenuse formed by the two sides of the house. This will help cover the opening near the house from our deck install and it will look good from the front of the house. Hopefully, this can get finished this week. We will see…

It’s supposed to rain

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Well it’s midweek and I was able to get some work done at home. I had to juggle some things around as I will be covering shifts at work the rest of the week due to shortages and Covid. Mr Rainman has been working on getting field #1 ready to plant. He was able to disc yesterday and pick up rocks in the fairly nice part of the field. Today he spent four solid hours picking rocks only in about 1.5 acres and applying them to the new water berm I am building up there. I am trying to get the old berm back into shape and then build a secondary berm to stop any overflow or breakthroughs from flooding the entire field. It will take me about another two years to get it all done. I want it in place so when I plant alfalfa I won’t have to worry about the field getting flooded and ruined. He was able to get the entire field picked of rocks and all disced. I just need to go up there with the harrow and it will be ready to plant.

First thing this morning we took a couple of hours to clean off the old house porch. It was covered in tools from all our summer projects and the deck. We managed to get it all sorted, put away in old house or taken out to the machine shed. We even swept off the porch and took out the trash! I proceeded to swap out the rusted painted screws in the tin around our pillars. I had to scrub the rust away then install the new painted screws. I also cleaned up some of the old caulk around the pillars. I did caulk the bottom of the pillars but have ordered a plastic molding to go around the bottom of the large pillars so they match the 4×4 covers. I was informed tonight that I need to order some 1/4 round for the top of the pillars. I was just going to put white caulk at the top. I am told that won’t look as good, the plastic trim is a special order item so I will have to get that ordered.

After lunch I took 40 minutes and stripped the hair from our Brussels Griffin. He is a terrier and you have to pull their hair out instead of shaving them. He is used to it and just sits in my lap. He doesn’t really like it around his nose or lower legs. He is now super soft and cuddly. Annmarie got the John Deere tractor tire repaired again. They installed the tire on backwards last time so we had to get them to turn it around. We installed the tire and hooked up the planter/seeder to the little tractor. I ended up having to replace one tooth on the cultivator that was broken. It had two different hay strings wrapped around it and some metal bailing wire and a piece of barbed wire! Those all got removed and the equipment adjusted so it merely needs seed in the hopper and its ready to plant! We are supposed to get 1/2” of rain on this upcoming Friday & Saturday. I will be working so no time will be lost due to the weather. I found a hydraulic leak on the new tractor but do not have a metric wrench that big, so I will need to buy some more tools, dang. The sheep have still not had any more babies.