Mr Rainman

Fencing shed good enough

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Friday, Mr Rainman and I worked on the fencing shed some more. Our goal was to keep the rustic look on the outside. By putting vertical boards inside we were able to cover up almost all of the holes in the walls. We turned the boards with the most aged color to the outside and you cannot hardly tell when you look at the building. We pulled most of the 2×4 boards off of the burn pile. They were pulled off of our house this summer when the siding was done. They were the window trim that was covered by metal trim. The old 2×6 boards I put around the bottom were in the building already. I had salvaged them from somewhere and put them in there years ago. It rained off and on all day on Friday and of course it was not a burn day. We have been trying to burn our big debris pile for three weeks and it’s never a burn day.

I got the solar light installed but the thing has a light sensor on it so it will not turn on when it senses too much light! So even though it’s a little dark in the building without lights it won’t allow you to turn on the lights. I had to go out in the dark to ensure the light does work, it works just fine and it is quite bright inside at night.

Saturday was a burn day! We got the last of the scraps from our work on the shed and there was a pile on the other side of the machine shed. The fire started right up and we ended up having to watch it for about 90 minutes until it had burned down and we could work on the fencing supply shed. We ended up going to the old house and pulling all of the leftover plywood from various projects and loading it up for use in the shed. The shed was pretty solid but once we started putting those spare scraps of sheeting and boards the entire thing is now rock solid! Unfortunately, the 12” anchors came and they are not long enough. They will only get into the railroad ties about one inch, so I ordered 14” anchors and when they come we will anchor the building to the railroad ties. At this point I do not see the building blowing over ever again.

Once we started piling up the burn pile we went out to the fencing supply are and dug up another load of rotten wood to toss on the fire. We really need to clean up this entire area but I have fence posts and fencing on the old wooden parts of various structures. It is keeping them all off the ground and I am unwilling to give up this luxury yet. I could lay out old tires and use them instead? It’s an idea and not a bad way to keep everything from rotting or rusting. We still have quite the pile of used tires.

Mr Rainman and I had a spirited debate on how well either of us can eyeball 2-6”. He was on the outside of the building screwing inwards and I was directing him from the inside. This continued for two days and a tape measure had to appear a couple of times to determine who was right and wrong. He is a good sport. Plus, I am working on increasing my fiber and the steady stream of farts was enough to keep him out of the building.

The bill from the plumber arrived this week. It was a mere $120 for the plumber to tell me that the drain shut off valve was closed. Some lessons are hard learned. I am sure everyone at the office had a good chuckle at my expense.

The County soil and water conservation district manager reached out to me a few weeks ago to talk about a grant to install some more fencing along the creek. This works for both of us and I have done it in the past before Covid. He came out on Friday and we walked the property. I am looking at putting some more fence up on the hillside. I already have two sides on a four acre spot done. The only two sides left are along the creek and up the hill. He will work up a proposal and submit it, I would not expect to know for six months if it is approved. This will let the animals knock down the weeds on the hillside also so we can use less herbicides.

We are going to start spraying Rejuvra on the upper bottoms and down by the schoolhouse. We are going to try and get control of the cheat grass. It’s going to be a race now with the weather. We are finally starting to get some regular moisture.

Mr Rainman was able to get my future craft room in the old house cleaned out. We have already started to stage supplies for the bathroom but I am getting ready to order some more tile this week and then we will need to bring down the vanity so I can start working on it. February is going to come sooner than I would like.

Once we had the inside of the shed done I could not help but fill it! I was able to sort most of the fencing buckets and hang the tools on the walls. I have an entire four gallon bucket of loose fencing staples but am now using the DeWalt stapler exclusively. If anyone wants enough loose staples to do 1/2 mile of fencing holler you can have them. I am never going back to hand nailing them! I probably need another two boxes of staples for the amount of fencing we are going to do next year. I did find a bunch of the smooth wire tighteners! I had quite a few, they were just scattered all around. The next thing is for a wall organizer but that can come later. In 2025, we will get the used tin up on the roof and get a solid door built then it will be 100% completed.

Fencing/metal shed

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I know I was supposed to be finishing up the winterizing projects. Finish installing parts on the bailer and finish emptying wood out of the old house. We are getting my future craft area all cleaned out so that we can use that as a staging space for the bathroom remodel in February. It already has a sink, toilet, shower head out there currently.

But honestly, I did not want my future fencing tools/supplies and metal storage area to blow away. This building was originally a chicken coop then did duty as a lamb shed. When we had the terrible windstorm that ripped part of the barn roof off it rolled this building about 100 yards. It is odd to see a building rolling across the ground. Even weirder when I was able to move it and it was still intact! Since that time it has tipped over once and spun ninety degrees in place from the wind. I have been wanting to get all of my fencing supplies and tools out of the machine shed. They take up four pallets worth of space and I wanted to be able to put metal scraps and pieces under cover so when I need pieces for weld repairs they are all in one place and not spread out over 100 feet and buried under other crap.

It does not hurt that it is the allure of a new project enticing me to do something. Mr Rainman and I got the last railroad tie installed under the building then filled the one foot gap with an old 2×8” board. We had to chase out one cat before we could get started. I don’t want any kind of animal living under the shed or for that matter in the shed. The door on the building is made out of chicken wire and if I just add a six inch piece on the bottom it will keep out all four legged creatures. We will need to add hardware cloth to keep the little birds from flying in and building nests in the rafters. I ordered twelve inch long deck anchors so that I can attach the building to the railroad ties. They were incredibly expensive at $3.60/each. I only ordered a dozen from the entire building. The additional weight should help keep the building from blowing away, plus putting it next to the machine shed helps break up the wind at least from one direction.

Once we tore off the bottom board on once side and started to clean out the building we realized that if you shake the walls the entire building was moving. This meant we had to look at the bones of the building. There was a roof joist that was not touching the sill plate and one of the sides it had split. It needed two new boards cut and then attached to the old joist. We even squeezed the split joist together and put a few screws in it before attaching the new joist to it. For all the purists out there this is a shed. It has lasted 70-80 years already so I just need it to last another 50 years. We found another roof joist that looks like it broke in half but it was still perfectly aligned. We just slapped another 2×4 up next to it and screwed it in. I had five new 2×4 but we used about 20 to fill in all of the upper and lower sections of the wall. Doing this really stiffed up the old building. We had one soft corner where we installed three new upright 2×4. By this I mean we just toed in another one next to the soft spots. We also put some supports in near the top of the roof to stiffen the roof. I am going to have to climb up on the roof and install a metal roof and I don’t want it breaking. I have some old used metal tin that did not get used up when I roofed the barn. It is old and aged and will go perfectly with the building. I will even reuse the roof cap it currently has as those are hard to find.

My Mother-in-law wanted the building to maintain its old look. To do this we are going to use a bunch of eight inch by eight foot boards that have been laying outside for the last ten years. I bought a unit at a charity auction and have had various projects that I thought I would use them on and never did. The unit had gotten spread out all over the ground and needed to be restacked. It was the perfect time to get boards because they were all weathered. We will line the inside of the walls with the new boards and put the weathered color outside. There are a ton of knot holes in the wood. They had covered the knot holes with cedar roofing shakes from the inside. We tore all those out to get a better fit for the inside boards.

Once we tore off the scraps of 80# asphalt paper, another reason the building probably held together well, we pounded in all of the nails on the outside walls. Surprisingly, the cupping on a lot of the boards was pulled out by hammering in the nails. We will use black screws from the outside to attach the boards to the frame and to attach the inner boards against the gaps and knot holes.

We are going to cover up the windows. I have an old window from the old house but honestly, it’s a shed and I have already ordered a solar, motion sensitive light for the interior. No power required! I had hopes that we would be able to finish it up on Sunday but the rain is pouring down so it is going to have to wait. I love using the tractor as a working platform when cutting a lot of boards. I can adjust the fork height to the perfect working height.

Annmarie spent the day canning spaghetti sauce, we had been freezing the tomatoes and she was able to make three gallons of spaghetti sauce! So now we can have spaghetti every month.

New fencing storage area

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Mr Rainman came out today to help me with projects. For some unknown reason there is a very polite Oregon State Police Officer who is now patrolling our region. I have been pulled over twice and gotten warnings but was told next time is a ticket. Mr Rainman found him this morning on his way to the farm. I have actually started to stop at all stop signs, even four corners as he comes out of nowhere all the times I have been caught. We both had checked the County website to see if today was a burn day but it was not. We need to burn three separate piles and have been saving up all of our cardboard for the last three weeks. I also installed an off/on remote for the lights in the Gazebo. We hooked up the trailer and drove the Kubota over to a friend’s house. She had a power pole she wanted gone. We were able to get three ten foot posts out of the pole and we took all her scrap she had piled up. It was not very much and she was having a hard time getting someone to pick it up. We just tossed it onto our metal scrap pile. Eventually, I will get a bin delivered and will load up all the scrap metal.

I went to town to pick up our beef, #34 is ready to eat! We got five boxes of beef from a 370# carcass. Mr Rainman and I emptied the entire small deep freezer and managed to get all of the beef into it. This way we can concentrate on eating the beef from the two standup freezers before we start digging into the new beef. There is enough room to fit the lamb we have coming in January. Annmarie is going to can spaghetti sauce tomorrow so I was able to remove a lot of frozen tomatoes and get them thawing for tomorrow. This way the peels just come right off and you don’t have to blanch them. I also discovered some more frozen fruit for breakfast smoothies that had gotten buried.

The old lamb shed/chicken coop needed to get moved so I can start storing all of the fencing tools and all of the scrap metal that is still usable for projects and repairs. The building is 12’x12’. It’s old and the bottom boards are rotted out in places so Mr Rainman was skeptical that we could do it without tearing it up. We bet a coffee on it before getting started. The plan was to use the Kubota to lift up one side and insert round chunks of fence posts under the building and use them as rollers. We had checked and the Kubota could lift one side of the building up off the ground about six inches. This was all untested and after looking at the travel path we decided that we were going to have to go up a four foot hill and make a ninety degree turn with the entire building before going up the hill. It was slow going but we were able to get the building moved in under a couple of hours. Mr Rainman had spent the time leveling the future spot next to the machine shop while I was getting lucky #34 from the butcher. We did not break anything and once in place we were able to get three railroad ties under the building edges. The fourth one is at the other end of the alley and will get installed tomorrow. I will be getting a free cup of coffee!

Mr Rainman says there are four teenager kittens living in the hay side of the machine shop. I have not seen any of them yet. The ties are ten feet long so we are ending up with a one foot gap that allows access under the old building so tomorrow we will be filling the gap so that no animal other than mice can get under it. We found a lot of cat poop and a dead flat cat under the building when we were moving it. Once it is resided I think I will screw ground anchors around the building and chain it to down to the ground from an eyelet in the railroad tie. This building has been blown over and around several times. I can anchor the building to the railroad ties via anchors through the floor. Maybe we can just get enough scrap metal in the building so it cannot be blown over. I will get the floor anchors coming and then work on getting the building ready for storage. Somewhere in here I realized that the gas cap was missing from the tractor and after searching neither of us can find it. A replacement was ordered and it should be here by Tuesday.

Now that I had the building moved I had to hold up the other end of the bargain and get the Little Dinky tractor moved to my mother-in-law’s house. The tractor is buried in the ground from never moving. We tried to pull it out with the Kubota but the front tires were trying to bend. We lifted the front of the tractor up and used old roofing panels under the front tires to keep them from sinking and letting them slide on something. We centered the pulling chain on the center of the tractor and tried to pull as straight as we could. We had already had to unbury the sickle bar mower and chain it in the upright position. Surprisingly, once we did all of that the tractor came out! It was fairly slow going as all four tires were flat and had flat spots on top of that. Mr Rainman rode the tractor and steered as I pulled it to its final destination. It looks good and in the spring it can get a good cleaning and it will look even better.

Winter feeding, a trial experience

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Annmarie has a friend that offered to let us put our sheep on about five acres of grass. The grass is over a foot high but the ground gets pretty wet in the late fall and he wants the grass knocked down so he will have a good crop of hay in the spring but he doesn’t want cows in there tearing up the ground. We went and looked at it last week and it has woven wire all around the outside and just needed a trough and some wooden stays to pull up the woven wire where his cows pushed it down trying to eat outside the fence last year.

We have never tried this before and did not know how many animals would fit into the 16’ stock trailer as the field is about 40 miles away. In all reality, we didn’t know how many sheep we actually had. But I figured we would count them before moving them so all was good. A month on good green grass is wonderful, when they get back we will sort them, keep our 13 lambs that are pre-sold and then take the rest of the lambs to the auction. They will be 10-11 months old and at their heaviest weight all with just grass feed.

So Mr Rainman and I cleaned up the farm on Thursday and got wooden stays and tools together to fix the fence and move sheep on Friday. I needed to buy another box of staples for the DeWalt fence stapler. I love this thing, it’s awkward and heavy but it slams out fencing nails like it is nothing. I was able to finish wiring up the power to the Gazebo and he got the lights strung up. We need a remote control to turn the lights on and off, it is already ordered and coming. The shelf supports also lean a little too much so I will need to add some spacers to make the countertop/sitting/shelf only tilt a little towards the outside. This way the water will run off outside the Gazebo. My customer from Tricities came over and bought a cow/calf pair that afternoon. We found the calmest pair possible out of the herd that were not polled and that is who we sent with him. They loaded fairly easy and he messaged me back saying they are doing great. He has them in with his small herd of goats. He brought out the heads of the two steers that we had taken to the butcher the previous week. Their heads will go on the old plow to just sit and let Mother Nature remove all of the skin and hide from them.

Friday morning we ran all of the sheep into the barn. There were a lot of sheep! I counted them as they came out the end of the chute to get into the barn and there were 93 sheep! This included the ten baby lambs that we got this summer. There was way too many to go in one trip. So we only tried to load 1/2 the herd into the trailer. Well, not all of the sheep thought that was a great idea and after they got 2/3 of the way down the chute they decided to turn and try and crawl over the backs of everyone still coming. All this did was create a logjam and Mr Rainman had to wade into the chute and grab them individually and toss them the other direction before pushing them into the trailer. This meant it took us about 20 minutes to get them loaded instead of five if they had cooperated. There was still some room, but not more than enough to fit another ten sheep, so dividing the herd was the right way to move them.

Off we went! Did I mention that when I started hauling the cows the trailer spare tire was flat so I had taken it to the shop to get repaired? I had not yet picked it up. We got to the outside edge of Pendleton and one of the stock trailer’s tires blew apart. I knew what it was the instant it happened so I pulled over and we called the tire store. I reminded them that my tire was already there so they put together another tire and brought them both out for us, we only waited 45 minutes. It was less than five minutes once they got there and we now had a spare tire. Of course we did not have a jack or tire speed wrench so I am not sure how much good that would have done us but that is not their fault. I will be buying a scissor lift and tire wrench to be mounted inside the trailer for just this reason. I am pretty sure both sides have the ability to mount a spare tire, and having a spare spare is a really good thing.

We had looked at the weather the previous day and it said rain most of the day so we packed rain gear just in case. It rained the entire time we were building fence. The DeWalt stapler does not like the rain. About 3/4 of the way through the job it started acting up and not wanting to staple. We fussed with it to keep it going but it was starting to slow us down. We ended up losing one of the lambs on the first trip, it got suffocated. I think it was when we blew the tire out the sheep ended up laying down for an extra 45 minutes and just laid on the lamb. We had to make a second trip to get the last of the sheep and they traveled without any problems but there were only two lambs in the second load and mostly larger sheep. Our rams are in with the sheep and Wil put his eight sheep in with ours also. He turned his ram loose into the herd so we are both hoping rams cross groups. By the time we showed up with the second trailer load of sheep both of the herds had finally started to co-mingle. Initially, they were staying separated.

I had Mr Rainman drop me off at the tire store so I could pickup “Little Dumper”, 1957 one ton truck. They had finally finished the brake job and some wheel bearings. The trouble is it would not start, so the owner and I tried for about five minutes before someone finally told him it was out of gas. They took me down to get two gallons and it started right up! I drove down to the gas station and put 16 gallons of non ethanol premium fuel in it for the drive home. It was starting to get dark and I don’t think the headlights work. I had just gotten to the edge of town when it started to act up. Like it was not getting enough fuel or getting too much. I kept milking it and slowing down then speeding up. I was driving the back gravel roads and waving everyone by me. I had called a friend whose house was on the way and asked her if I could just park it there until I could tow it home, she said yes. The problem was as I was coming down the hill towards her house it was running great! So I just took a risk and kept on going! It died within sight of her driveway and I could not get it started again.

I had called Annmarie when it started acting up and asked her to drive the back way in case I got stopped somewhere. She had heat and lights in her car. I had two people stop before she got there asking me if I needed any help. This is so nice in a rural area. I told them I was fine and help was on the way. We called my nephew again and he went to the farm and grabbed my heavy duty tow strap, purchased to pull the tractor out of the mud, and brought it out. He towed me back to the farm and I messaged Gingerman. He will tear out the carburetor and do a clean and rebuild. He said one of the floats kept sticking when he was getting it started the first time. The brakes work great and since they are 100% manual, no power was required to operate them on the tow home.

Staycation day 10

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It is not really day 10 as I had to work on Monday but it’s close enough. The Gingerman spent Sunday with my daughter working on a creating a yard gate for my mother-in-law. He got it all up and attached with extra support inside garage so gate doesn’t sag. I have a welded horseshoe chain ready to go. I just need to meander down there and get it installed.

Mr Rainman came out on Monday and cleaned up a bunch of rotten wood and emptied some old decking out of the grain bin. It sounds easy but there was a lot of stuff and the spot he did it is looking amazing. We are going to empty the chicken coop first of all of the rough cut maple and black walnut that is stored out there. Next year we will take the black walnut from last year and get it stacked out there also. It’s waterproof and we will put stickers on the green stuff and just stack the other nice and tight. That will be a lot of weight to hold everything down. We will put wood stickers on the concrete so the wood has an air gap. This will free up a lot of space in the old chicken coop.

I plan on moving most of the tool storage from the old house out to the old chicken coop. Most of those tools and supplies are super specialized and I have them all sorted into separate bins. This way you can just grab a specific bin type for the needed job type. I only do tile work occasionally, same with painting supplies. I am also going to sort out most of my corded tools and give them away. They work just fine but I use battery powered almost exclusively now. It is so convenient when I am out and about on the farm. He also got the back drainage tank set up with a drain. This sits under the roof valley and catches the water and ice as it comes off our roof. We split the drain pipe in hopes that it would not freeze up this winter and crack.

I keep running to town every couple of days to get little things for the next project. I had to go and buy electrical conduit and wiring plus some miscellaneous wiring items. I figure that by the time I am completed there will be about $250 worth of electrical supplies just to get a double outlet of 110V out to the Gazebo. We want a string of lights around the inside of the gazebo. We have a set upstairs on the breeze porch that you can set the brightness on and I can wire in a timer if needed.

Today I worked on getting all of the conduit installed. I glued the main line together and pulled 130’ of 12g wire through it. I was able to install the wiring in the brick box I made last year. There is quite a bit of humidity inside the box so I used vulcanizing tape and electrical tape in alternating layers to keep the moisture out of the electrical connection. It takes a while to get it all taped up and it is pure misery to remove but it’s how we did it when I was in the Navy and it held out against salt water so I figure I should be good for a few years at a minimum.

I wanted the conduit in the Gazebo to be fairly hidden so I mounted it under area where the countertops are going to be installed. I had to loosen the gazebo anchoring bolts into the 6×6 boards to make enough room to jam the conduit behind the posts. This makes for a nice clean conduit run. I will need to anchor it all back in place tomorrow.

Snoop, ancient black alpaca, was whining at me over the weekend until I gave him an apple over the fence. The alpaca are incredibly noisy and if they want something they are more than capable of communicating that desire to you via a cacophony of altering sounds. I have been feeding the animals leftover apples for days now and still have 2-3 more days worth of apples to feed out. They were the rejects from my mother’s trees.

We still do not have any more lambs! It is the most bizarre thing ever. Yes there are still some pregnant, about 8-10. I checked on Little Dumper on Monday but the person in charge was not present and I was unable to get an update. I need that truck so we can get a bunch of rocks to put on the hillside to stabilize the gazebo downhill side bank.