Mr Rainman

Work room ready

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Mr Rainman came out today so we could finish getting the old house room ready for a workspace. We need to build the custom oak cabinet and we will need to get the paint off the bathroom door and refinish it. There is a ton of space now! I opted to keep the one shelf unit full of screws and connectors in the old house. I am always looking for a nail or screw and this will keep them handy. The Gingerman helped me move the old kitchen cabinet into the workroom and it will hold clamps and DeWalt tools that don’t need to be out in the machine shed. I also need to order some more battery holders so I can keep charged batteries on the wall and any battery found laying around can be assumed to be empty.

The room was vacuumed from ceiling to floor then the leaf blower was turned loose on the room to try and get the last vestiges of dust. Nope, it looked like a sandstorm had been cut loose in the room. We will come back in a week and vacuum all surfaces again. That should be good enough to keep the dust from falling down onto the bathroom projects. We would need to go up in the attic and vacuum the entire area above the room. That is really not necessary for what we are doing.

We are closing on being ready for the bathroom remodel. I have managed to stage the following items:

  • All enclosed single piece elevated toilet (heavy!)
  • Bathroom light
  • Exhaust fan with Bluetooth speaker
  • Magnetic shower head on a wand
  • Sink
  • Sink faucet
  • Sink push button drain
  • 10/4 100’ wire for bathroom heater
  • Overhead 220V heater
  • 30 minute 220V timer switch for heater
  • Solid brass knobs for vanity and custom cabinet
  • Solid brass handles for vanity
  • Solid brass toilet paper holder
  • Zip wall zipper
  • Wall towel rack

The biggest thing left is the Schluter system. I think I am going to do a membrane covered floor to disconnect the tile from the subfloor. I talked to the project manager yesterday and I can use tongue and groove wood on the upper half of the two bathroom walls, zero sheetrock needed! This is a huge selling point for me as I hate working with plaster, I make such a mess.

I did not really feel like sorting out in the old chicken coop so there is a huge pile of stuff out there that still needs to be sorted. It can stay there for now and I will sort it eventually. We even left all of the tiling tools in the old house for staging. I will need to dig around in the box before I go buy Schluter parts so I know if I need to pick anything else up.

Mr Rainman will come out one day this week and vacuum the house attic. We will need to take up some of the attic floor so that I can wire in a second bedroom light. It is too dark in there at night with only a single overhead light. It would probably help if we did not have stained glass lights throughout the entire house.

Making space so bathroom cabinet can be made

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It was time to get the last room in the old house cleaned out. I need to make the custom cabinet for the bathroom but I need a spot to assemble it and to finish it. The best spot for this is the old house. We have already started to stockpile bathroom remodel items in my eventual office space. I had to make a list of items we currently have as I was unsure where everything was located. It was a good thing I did as I could not find the 100’ 10/4 wire I need for installing the overhead bathroom heater. I searched everywhere and could not find it. Amazon said it had been delivered but I was unsure of that alleged fact. I finally remembered that I had taken two boxes out to the barn. I thought both boxes were for the fancy salt we got for the sheep. I checked last night when I went out to feed and lo and behold one of the boxes was the “alleged” 100’ of wire. It is now staged in the old house. The big ticket item left is the tin ceiling and our tile for the two short walls. I called on the wall tile and it was supposed to be here this week but I did not get a call. I won’t need it until about Feb 8 so I am not panicking yet. With the tin ceiling that only leaves two short walls to paint. I am thinking I may have enough tongue and groove boards to cover both walls but I have not talked with the project lead for approval. If I can do that then I will not have to do any Sheetrock work!

Today we worked on getting the old house emptied. I did take some time to help cleanup Annmarie’s laser wood pile. I cut off all of the unusable scraps and left her with a bunch of 4-8”x12” pieces. She will have to sort them all out but her burn pile and scrap pile is much smaller now.

Mr Rainman kept unloading shelves and piling it up in the old chicken coop. Once I was done with the honey do item we took another shelving unit out to the coop and then started to sort everything. There were piles every where but we managed to get it all sorted and put away. I even labeled the big black bins so we knew what was in them. We did find a bunch of heavy duty deck anchors and a bunch of electric fence supplies so those all got moved out to the fencing shed. I will not need to buy anchors for quite a while. We have one corner of the old chicken coop to clean out tomorrow. We are only going to take one more shelf unit out of the old house.

I installed two new over the window shelves in the old house and looked at how to arrange the room once we get it empty. I think we need to raise the wooden cabinet another six inches then I can slide one of the tool boxes under it. That will let me store all of the tools in one corner of the room. I am even thinking about moving the shelving unit in my office into this room. A lot of DeWalt tools are kept in that cupboard.

The baby chickens are getting big. I now have to fill their water dish every two days. It is almost time to hang the waterer with the peckers on it. It is a five gallon bucket with drink spouts on the bottom. It will last a week at a time so I don’t have to fill water so often. The chicks will stay in their area until they are fully feathered and run out of room. Once those conditions are met I will just latch the door open and let them wander in and out. That way they get to choose whether they want to interact with the other chickens or not.

Prepping for bathroom supplies and trying to finish old items

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I had Mr Rainman come out this week to try and finish up some projects we had already started. He was able to shove both burn piles back together so they are ready for a second burn. After that he worked on cleaning out the spring channel. We still had a lot of flood related branches and brambles clogging up the waterway even though it has been a few years. We have not been able to really find the time to do this cleanup but since we are burning we decided that adding to the burn pile was a necessity. There is still some cleanup to be done but it is a ton better than it was.

That same flood caused a tunnel to form under one of the culverts. It’s the only culvert we have over the spring. Mr Rainman is convinced that the ground around it is going to cave in any second. He brought in two loads of rocks and put them in the holes appearing around the culvert. He had to do it again the next day. I figure if he does it one or two times more he will have filled in the tunnel next to the culvert and we should be good. He is saving his “I told you so” for when the tractor falls in the hole. We have agreed to disagree and he has the “I told you so” ready.

He was able to finish moving the last of the black walnut from the old chicken coop to the grain bin. Once he did that he proceeded to clean up the old chicken coop. I was pretty surprised by how much dirt and debris he was able to get out of the coop. I cleaned it up a decade ago. The plan was to create space so we can move the tools and bins from the old house out to the old chicken coop.

He also ended up moving things around so we had a clear side. This will work great for the move out of the old house. We will tackle the move this weekend when there are two of us. Some of the cabinets are very heavy and I needed to go through all of the items.

Less crazy is a good thing

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I came home early on Monday so Mr Rainman and I could sort the cows. We wanted to wean off the babies and move them down with the teenagers, then sort off the bull and put him in Alcatraz, pull six horned cows off the herd and load up into the trailer to go to the sale first thing Tuesday morning, and let the other momma cows go toward the upper pastures. This was all preceded by getting the cows into the corral. Despite three attempts the two of us could not drive the cows toward the corral. We need the arena panels to go across the spring access in the barn lot, the cows just kept breaking around us.

I went into the house and retrieved the border collie Chance so that the cows would move. There were some explicitly worded commands given once she started to ignore me. Eventually, we got the cows into the corral. Mr Rainman had just finished the last of the repairs on the corral on Monday and it worked. We managed to get six of the horned devils into the trailer.

They were dropped off at the auction house and the check for their sale already came to the house! It was pretty much what I expected for cows who are old and just had calves weaned off the day before. The important part is that they are no longer on the farm. The herd was already calmer once we got the crazy out of the group.

We are back to having to do nightly feeding of the sheep in the barn again. They take seven bales spread out amongst the feeders. I set out 10 bales initially and figured out what they could eat in a day from that. There are a couple of bales in the feeders that they don’t particularly like so if they want to nibble on something they are there. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of feeding the sheep at night, chase all the sheep out first and shut the door of the barn before feeding. The first night was total chaos with the sheep running around and jumping on the bales as I attempted to unwrap them to load them into the feeders. A couple of the bales had to stay on the floor as I could not get them away from the sheep. I now follow the cardinal rule when feeding and it is a lot more organized and a lot faster.

It’s cold outside

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Winter is finally here. It is down in the low 20’s F at night and barely over freezing during the day. So it is not super pleasant to be outside. I have been so busy that I have not done much around the farm. Luckily, Mr Rainman is still cleaning up and working on small things. He was able to get the three posts installed on the corral. The two internal posts required that the old posts get reset and tightened up also. There is not a bit of wiggle in that side of the corral now! You used to be able to grab the rail and move the fence a few inches in each direction. The last thing for the corral is to finish building the rock crib. It just needs some wooden sides and wire mesh inside that to hold all the rocks inside. It will take 4-6 hours to fill the entire space with rocks but by the time it is completed there will be no moving that side of the corral and the new gate will be anchored securely.

The Gingerman spotted that our main gate into the barn lot broke at the base on the hinge side. When the gate was used it was starting to flex apart due to the break. In true farmer fashion, he plugged in the welder, dug around in the scrap pile and dirt to find some old small metal pieces then proceeded to just randomly weld them in place until the crack was repaired. He then tack welded the hinges as the bolts were not holding them rigid. He also raised the gate a few inches and dug out the hinge side so it no longer drags when you open and close it. The gate works better now than it has in 15 years!

Mr Rainman also got all of the holes dug around the bee platform. I had to make a run over to Home Depot last week so I was able to get all of the pressure treated lumber necessary for building an arch over the bee platform. I am going to use the same 1×8”x8’ pieces we used on the inside of the fencing shed to sheet the outside of the arch. I also have some leftover metal roofing from working on the barn that I will use for the roof. The wind just tore up the empty hives we had on the platform. If there had been bees in them I am not sure we could have salvaged them after the storm. The bees are hard enough to keep without us just letting the wind destroy them. We already have a new Nuc ordered for the spring and Annmarie is fairly confident she can split the hive fairly easily now. I would like to see us going into next winter with three hives.

We are still getting ready for the bathroom remodel. I have ordered the tile for the last two walls, which look like linen wallpaper. I am looking at the custom cabinet design for the right side of the vanity that I want, so I can start in on it soon. This has to be wife approved, it will be made out of oak plywood.

I did the cabinet mock up and the wife did not like the single door on the sink side of the cabinet. It will house all the electronics, my electric razor, hearing aids and any other items that need electrical outlets. This will clean off the countertop. So I had to move it to the front. Now I just need to go buy my three full sheets of 3/4” oak plywood. I will have to do the doors last but they can wait for now.