lambs

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.

Headed into 2025 with a shuffle

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The last of 2024 was painful. Our progeny brought home Covid for the holidays when the entire county is drowning in Influenza. I think I would have rather had the flu. We did manage to get Christmas dinner on the table with a lot of help and we did get to eat said dinner. Otherwise, we slept a lot and took a lot of over the counter medications for symptom control. The Gingerman was the healthiest of us all so he kept the animals fed and even managed to get both large burn piles lit over the course of a week, despite the downpour of intermittent rain we continue to receive.

I have been able to do a few small things around the house. I was able to get the entire driveway torn up and leveled this weekend. An inch of rain really helps soften up the road so I can tear up the top few inches and then drag it smooth. Ideally, it would dry out for a week or so and let the newly moved dirt settle but it just keeps raining. We have already gotten 1.2” of rain in 2025 and it is not even the first week of the year. Our snowpack is at record highs, over 150% so I sure hope that it does not warm up fast this spring or things will be messy. The back creek bed is over twice as wide as it used to be due to the last two floods we had. I am hoping this is enough to keep it contained. We have implemented a couple of other flood control and diversion ditches but none have been tried yet and honestly, I would like to just think that they will work as designed and not have them utilized. Sometimes, it is the thought that counts!

Our sheep are doing great! That fattening up they had in Nov & Dec is holding them over well. We are feeding 6-7 bales every night and they are maintaining weight. I have been feeding for over a month and this last Friday I spotted two raccoons in the barn. They were in the front hay room hiding in the walnut boards that are air drying. There is no way out so they had to stay there the entire time I was feeding. I of course did not have a gun as I have not been taking one out when I feed. It did occur to me to go back to the house and get one but every time I was away from the room for 30 seconds they kept trying to sneak out and I knew they would be gone by the time I got back. It never occurred to me to just call the wife and have her walk the pistol out to me, it was muddy, dark, raining and miserable outside. So now I carry my predator pistol and two clips out to the barn at night for feeding and of course have not seen a single raccoon. I thought we only had one out in the barn, they avoid all traps so shooting them seems to be the only way to get rid of them.

We are taking the last of the animals to slaughter this week. We are taking in eleven lambs for meat for new homes. I have one customer who is opting to do their own cut and wrap. This will be the last of the animals for sale until the lambs from this summer are ready around July 2025.

We have been ordering stuff and getting it ready for the bathroom remodel. We have decided to put in an overhead electric heater, so I am going to have to wire in a 220V service with a timer switch. A 220V timer switch is fairly industrial. So now the wife wants me to hide it in the custom built cabinet. She also wants me to wire in an outlet into the cabinet so that I can hide all of the electronics on one shelf in the cabinet. Both of these things are possible since I am building everything from scratch but it does tend to complicate things. This does not seem to be a consideration when detailing changes. It doesn’t help that I agree with her, having all of the electronics hidden will make for a cleaner, more organized bathroom with more countertop space. I need a 220V breaker, a tile drill bit and a new tile saw blade. I always start a new tile job with a new blade. I am sure I will need more stuff as I know the house is plumbed with Pex but I won’t know if its Pex A or B until I tear into the wall and can look at the connectors. I think it’s Pex B but not positive until I inspect the connectors. There is always something to throws things off. I am going to block off the hallway and set up the tile saw in the hallway after setting up plastic walls outside the bathroom. I will have to bring all of the tile inside and let it warm up to room temperatures before it can be installed. I already told Annmarie that our house is just going to be a construction zone for one month and there is nothing I can do about it.

Bathroom remodel prep work

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Winter can be seen from our house, the foothills of the Blue Mountains are covered in snow and on top the local snowpack is 175% of normal. It’s 44 F today at our house and the most we get is rain on a fairly regular basis now. It is supposed to rain almost every day this week. Of course I never bother to look at the weather person predictions unless we are spraying or cutting hay so I thought it would be a great idea to move some dry wood around on the farm.

Mr Rainman had emptied out one of the old grain bins and the plan is to get all of the rough cut black walnut and maple out there and store it until it is needed for some project. All of the trees were obtained from family or friends for the labor of removing them from the property. I had them custom cut into slabs at our local mini mill. The hardest part is having the space to sticker them and let them dry out. We have had the maple for over 15 years and some of the black walnut for eight years. I have one massive piece of 10 foot black walnut that is 20” wide with one raw edge and 18’ thick, ten feet long. It has split in two almost dead center so that there are now two pieces with a live edge. It has another 5 years to dry out, you only get 1” per year when air drying. The large crack will help it dry out faster as it is almost 1/2” in width. I wanted to get it all in one spot where we do not go, it won’t get damaged so we can use our other spaces. I have about 1/3 of the old chicken coop full of rough cut wood. I would like to get that wood all moved out, do some slight rearranging in the chicken coop and then I can move out most of the tools and storage from the old house. This will give me an open room for projects near the house. A lot of what is in the old house is in bins for various types of activity. There is a bin for working sheet rock, bin for installing ceramic tile, bin for painting, shelf of finishing nailers and supplies, several bins for wiring a house, various organizers for parts, nails, screws and a shelf for ice fishing. I have not been in 20 years, but there are a lot of mini rods!

Gingerman and I went out yesterday and started to load the flatbed with black walnut boards, 1” thick, then 2” then we got to the 3” slabs that are ten feet long and those are heavy! We got the first load all onto the trailer and had a plan to come back for the maple. The rest of the black walnut is in the main barn off of one of the hay rooms and is not currently in the way. We drove to the grain bin over the sketchy culvert I have in the barn lot. It really needs to be dug out and reset as the water is going through, under, and alongside it. This is causing the dirt to collapse so I keep jamming large boulders alongside the culvert to prevent anything from falling into the gap. I have a couple more years before total failure hits. We ended up needing to take out the door metal supports on the grain bin, these add structural strength to the door so it does not blow out when grain is in the bin. I swept up and as we were finishing cleaning it started to rain. So now our dry wood is getting wet and I did not bring enough stickers to put between the slabs. We hustled and got all the wood in and set some leaning on the perimeter to be stacked next time we try and move wood.

I really want to get this done in the next week so I can build the bathroom cabinet in the current storage room. It would help immensely.

Since it was raining I decided to back to working on the new bathroom vanity. Gingerman helped me and we got the holes for the sink and faucet placed on the dresser top. I had found some boards out in the old chicken coop to use on the dresser transformation to vanity. The dresser is made out of oak but I am not adding oak pieces for the transformation. I will stick with some Douglas fir and stain it. I was able to get the large drawer put together with nails and glue, it needs to spend the night in the office to dry. I will be able to cut the back out of it once dry and it will still work as a partial drawer, over one half was able to be saved. I have a small drawer on the top that will only be about 3-4” deep. I may put a couple of 2” long spots on the side, I have not decided yet as to whether they would actually be usable.

We were fortunate enough to get more baby chicks on Friday from Mr Horse Tamer. He has an incubator and started 30 eggs, we got 29 straight run chicks. I spent Friday evening putting down new bedding, food and water in the baby chicks area for them. One had splayed legs and he told me to tape the legs together for 24 hours and it sometimes gives the hip muscles time to firm up and the chicks will do well. Gingerman and I took the tape off the next day and the chick is moving around and doing great. We had one yellow chick just die but everyone else is doing great. They have a heat lamp and a heat shelter so even though they are in an unheated coop they are staying nice and warm. I decided to use the heat lamp in conjunction with the shelter as it will also keep the water from freezing solid if it gets that cold.

The check came from the auction and we were gloriously surprised! Those 18 whethers weighed on average 98# and sold for $160/each! They killed it, the auction website said the average price for lambs was $55-150. We scored, those sheep looked amazing, the timing and quantity all rolled up to form the perfect circumstances.

Experiment a success

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Today we went and picked up the sheep from Hermiston. They probably could have gone a couple more weeks but we can maybe start a little earlier next year. It was a success for the land owner and the field looks great. Their first cutting of hay next year will look very nice. We brought all of our light panels from the barn and were able to form a chute to the trailers. Initially, we had a Y setup but the stupid sheep did not want to go through the chute system so we had to push them and do one trailer at a time. We took down the temporary fence and rolled it all up, we will reuse it next year. The field was so wet that no one used the water trough, they just drank from the various low spots that had a few inches of water. We ended up just loading up all of the sheep into the two trailers then drove them to our house. We backed up to the corral and then unloaded each trailer into the corral area and then we sorted the sheep off into three batches. One group went back into the trailer-those were Wil’s, one group to the back pen-all boys, and last group was all females and the two rams. Since we have three pens that worked great and all of us managed a single gate to move them in or out of the chute as they were moved in. This worked great and took us about 45 minutes.

Once Mr Horse Tamer had his and left we sorted off all of the lambs and put them back in with their mothers. We also sorted off the two rams and moved them into Alcatraz. Then we sorted the boys and took 13 off that are already sold and turned them in with the mothers. They won’t get slaughtered until early January. That left us with 18 lambs that will go to the auction next week. This will be the first time we have ever taken any to the auction so we hope it treats us well, but you never know. We had to move the feeders back into the barn and filled them all with hay. We won’t have lambs until early April 2025.

Mr Rainman and I worked on getting the bee shelter completed this week. He got the posts set and frame built. I made a trip to Home Depot and got three sheets of roofing tin at $45/each. The prices for materials these days are amazingly bad. Now is not the time to build a new building. We were able to use up the last of the 1x8x8’ boards on the shelter. We had to go to a board and batten siding pattern as we did not have enough lumber to go over each side twice. It is very loud inside the enclosure when someone is working on the roof with an impact driver. If the bees complain of the noise we can line the roof with plywood to dampen the sound. I will wait for the complaint department to voice an issue before doing this. We did have to put up a panel to keep the alpaca and cows out of the shelter, they had already found it before we had the roof on it and were hanging around. I had opened up the orchard to allow them to come in and knock down the foot tall grass. Now that there are no leaves on the trees they will leave them alone.

We were also able to but the boards on the new rock crib on the corral. It used up the last two rough cut 2×8 inch tamarack boards I had left from building Alcatraz. We cobbled it together and Mr Rainman will fill it with rocks tomorrow and put a panel over the new gate so the sheep don’t crawl under or through it. We used the old gate today to keep them from going through the new gate, by propping it on the inside of the new gate.

We have finally started getting eggs again, we are getting about a 30% production rate which is normal for us in the winter. Wil is hatching 30 chicks for us so that should get us 15 more hens. By mid summer we should be back up to 30 hens.

After all of that today, I needed a nap and I got one!

Predators 10, Farm 8

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Well it could not last, the predators are ahead again. At least this year it took them until September to get ahead. We are losing chickens daily now. They have killed eight chickens so I am down to 15 hens now. I will need another two dozen hens at this rate by the spring. This could really screw up my egg production next year. Bottom line as long as we make about one dozen eggs a week we can personally eat fresh eggs. No one else will get them but they don’t have chickens. Our plan is to move up creating a better Fort Knox for the chickens. We will finish the wire roof over the entire chicken run. Since there is an auto door going into the run now and it stays open 30 minutes after the sun goes down the chickens will all have time to at least get into the yard before that gate shuts down. This way any late chickens will be protected. They may be tormented by the predators trying to get into the chicken run but as long as a raccoon cannot get through the wire we should be good.

The other two deaths are newborn lambs. I counted them last week and there were only 13, there should have been 14. I walked the entire barn lot and could not find a corpse. I chalked it up to a miscount on my part. This is a common occurrence so it was an easy assumption. I was counting lambs today when we tag and banded them and there were only 12 lambs! Again, no corpse anywhere in the barn lot.

We talked about moving the lambs and mommas into the ram pasture and putting the other sheep out into the barn lot. But on further reflection we just decided to utilize the barn. It is ready, dug out, clean and has fresh bedding. We will just start doing the nighttime feed in there so the sheep will come automatically every evening. I locked everyone into the barn tonight. Mr Rainman will let everyone out in the morning when he comes to clean up.

We worked on the gazebo today until I pulled the not safe card. We then went and tagged and banded an even dozen lambs. We had someone reach out and ask us to save an intact ram boy. We saved a pure white one, the biggest of the lambs. He got a tag in the left ear and was not banded. This time around it is an even split between boys and girl lambs.

We then cleaned up the root cellar, put away tools and cleaned off the old house porch. Tomorrow, Mr Rainman will walk all the stream beds and pick up trash/limbs/lumber from them. We want to get all of this cleaned up before the spring ,when water starts running again. There are some boards that need to go into the burn pile and a second burn pile has been started up in field four, he will get all the loose material up there and toss it into the pile. We will have to wait until late fall after the rain starts to burn.

We are working on a list of things that need to be done in October when I take off on vacation, more like a staycation and farm catch up.