Mr Tex

Office work continues

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Well the office is still creeping along. I think it should go faster but something always seems to come up. I went over to Home Depot on Friday and spent 3 hours digging around and finding all of the stuff I needed to finish the wiring. I have to put a 240V 20A outside waterproof box outside for the heat pump. It took me a while to find the boxes and I got 1 of 3 left on the shelf. Pickings for some items were mighty slim. The plan was for Mr Tex, Mr Professional and Mr Flow to come out on Saturday so we could get the underside of the house finished.

They all did come on Saturday but the weather was miserable for working outside. We had a nice hail storm on top of the rain storms, alongside some horizontal lightening. I finally had to let Mouse back into the house as he had crawled up onto the porch and would not leave my side. Mr Professional and Mr Flow worked under the house for four hours and then left, the weather just kept getting worse.

I sent Mr Tex up into the ceiling to clean up all of the dust and stuff. While he did that I finished installing the outlet boxes in the office area. The only real problem was I managed to buy single gang horizontal boxes at Home Depot instead of vertical. I ended up having to remove all of the vertical boxes and use horizontal boxes so I had some horizontal boxes for the single gang switches. So now all of the low switch boxes are horizontal. I think I have 26 outlets in the office in a 13’x16’ room, with a 5’x5’ attached room. I am positive we will not need all 52 outlet plugs, but we have them just in case. I continued cutting holes in the walls in the second room to get ready for power in that room also.

Mr Tex came down to tell me he could not get into the ceiling above the small room. I knew there was a bird’s nest up there so I knew we needed to get it out. This meant that the entire ceiling had to be torn down. The ENTIRE ceiling was full of straw and feathers. We got it all out and then realized that the support boards were in rough shape and not attached to the wall of the house. So once we got that mess all cleaned up we took out some more of the floor and then started to install the overhead beam. We ended up making two beams as I forgot to make a hollow support and just glued and screwed them together with a 1/2” piece of plywood in the middle. Mr Tex went around and drilled holes through all the boards so we could run cable. I had purchased nail stops to go over all of the cable holes so we don’t accidentally staple the wire when installing the wall paneling. I have decided to go with tongue and groove blue pine for the walls installed on a diagonal. The ceiling will be juniper that will be kept unfinished so you can smell it. If I can get all of the wire pulled we can start installing the insulation. The windows have not arrived and we still have the main front door to reframe into a bigger opening. I want to keep the old door to use between the rooms when we do the other room. This will save some money.

We also started installing the overhead light electrical boxes. We are going to have to caulk some of the walls in the attic and install some screen in the roof peak to keep out the hornets. I think letting off a bug bomb every four weeks is going to have to become a habit until we can get a handle on all the little holes everywhere. We did more cleanup as it seems to be an ongoing issue. The old bathroom has a 5” slant over 6’. So I am going to have to find six 2×6” boards to cut on a diagonal so we can get a new level floor installed in that little room.

Since we had to tear out the ceiling in the old bathroom we are going to have to do the same thing in the freezer room. but it also needs three walls torn out and a new level floor installed. We will have to install both doors first as they are being stored in the old kitchen. Once we have them in then we can tear into the old kitchen area and get the rest of the walls out and outside building sealed. It is coming along but there were no great leaps other than getting the new overhead beam in place.

Office Progress

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Of course it was dumping snow out of the sky this morning and we had a couple of inches on the ground by the time I got out to start in on the new office. It was way too cold to be outside in the snow. Mr Tex came out shortly thereafter and we worked on the office. He finished ripping out the rest of the old bathroom walls. We found one whole side filled with birds nests and the opposite side had a nice mouse nest at the bottom of the wall.

I spent most of the morning figuring out how to get the new electrical box to line up with the electrical conduit outside the house. I will wire the entire box, all the outlets and switches and then in a couple of hours I will kill main power and then just move power supply over to the new box and then turn it on! I don’t want the freezers to be without power for very long. I realize a few hours is not a big deal but I think I can get the entire thing done in under two hours once I have it all prepped. We finally got the box in place and I got the entire thing framed out. I will cut out the plywood for the back next then I will start wiring the office room and the freezer room.

Once I had the electrical box in and Mr Tex had the old bathroom torn apart we started working on getting the walls sealed up from the floor and the attic. Some of the spaces we will be able to caulk as they are not very big but the big ones will need some spray in foam. The newer 2×4 lumber is not as wide as the stuff they used to use. This causes some gaps that we will just need to fill in. Unfortunately, it was so cold today that we could not use any liquid anything as it would not have set up. We had decided to put in fire brakes to help stiffen the walls. Once we had all of the shiplap off of the walls the room did not feel as sturdy. The supports are helping it to stiffen back up. We will have to drill holes in them to run the wiring but that can wait until we have everything in. I would like to paint the acrylic roofing onto the walls before we wire but the weather is going to determine the order on that choice. We need to be able to caulk first then paint. The ceiling is going to stay the same, we will just have to scrub it clean, prime it and paint it. The nice part is the ceiling will be the only part of the room that has to be painted. I have been contemplating a white wood stain for a couple of the walls and maybe another color, red for the work closet? Annmarie is going to have to help with that choice. The floor we are just going to hand sand and stain like I did our upstairs. I did notice today that they used to have linoleum in the room and there is still some glue in places. This stuff is hard to sand out as it gums up the sandpaper pretty fast but it’s not the entire room.

I went to Home Depot on Friday and bought two doors, a 32” and 36”. We will have to reframe the entire door into the room from the porch. It is just kind of hanging in the opening and there is no support or header for the door. It needs to be completely rebuilt. I hate hanging doors as it is very tedious and precise work. Luckily, we found a case of shims while we were cleaning out the old house so we are ready for doors and windows. One of the windows will be pulled out and covered up and the second one needs to be totally reframed for the same reason as the front door. I also ordered the two new windows. We will wait on tearing out and replacing the windows until we have the new ones. I got all of the lights and boxes to wire the room. I cannot believe the price of wiring! Twenty five feet of 10/2 with ground is $100. I need it to wire the 240V for the heat pump. I also emailed and texted the heat pump company to get an updated bid and I will pay for it now. We are now officially committed as I have spent $3k in supplies already. That will double once the heat pump goes in. I think I can get the entire thing done for about $8k.

Catching up mothers

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Well it was a long weekend, the weather was too nice for January, we set a record high temperature. I had Mr Professional and Mr Tex over for Friday and Saturday. The time was spent getting yards cleaned up and trees trimmed at both my Mother’s house and Mother-in-law’s house. We spent a day at each to get the trees and bushes trimmed and all of the clippings picked up and removed. I am definitely feeling my age. I crawled up into a tree and used a chain saw to cut branches out. I had to work at getting around inside the tree and was very glad the chainsaw was electric. The chain saw was so great I am going to go buy myself one with a 16” bar. It was super quiet and incredibly lightweight. Just fill bar oil and change out the battery! We ended up burning the slash pile two days in a row, there was so much material on it. At my mother-in-laws we cleaned off the hillside and removed blue spruce needles, leaves, wild roses, blackberries and branches. She had multiple plants with thorns and I was working up a sweat so I took off my warm hat. I have around eight cuts/scratches on my head from various branches and multiple scratches on both arms. Those thorny bushes make you pay for moving them.

On Sunday I didn’t want to really do anything, but things have to get done. So we moved a culvert up to field 4b and set a bigger one up into field 3. It is almost too wet to work with the tractors. The little John Deere kept trying to get stuck. It just does not have enough mass to get around when the ground is wet. Mr Professional keeps wanting to get tractor tire chains. I won’t do it. Chains would merely allow myself to get really stuck! We have a little time and will try and back fill around the culverts as the weather permits.

I do morning chores on the weekends and Annmarie does it the rest of the week. I do the evening chores and if I have to feed the cows it takes me an hour after work to get everything done. The morning chores consist of feeding horse, cats, four boy sheep and letting everyone out of the barn, ten minutes tops. The real problem here is if there are new babies then you have to catch them and get them and their mothers in a jug (crèche). That can take over an hour or be even more painful. The evening chores are just guaranteed to be long. I like the predictability of evening chores. So in a nutshell, the morning chores are like playing the lottery, you are a winner occasionally but most of the time its a losing proposition.

We got lucky and were able to be the recipient of ten 10 month old chickens. We picked them up yesterday. I put a large dog kennel in the back of the pickup and had a tarp and some straps I could wrap around it to keep the wind off of the birds. The problem is it was cold and we had about a 50 minute drive to get home. While we were eating dinner in our vehicle I felt pity and managed to jam the large kennel into the back seat by moving the front seats up as far as they would go. This is not the most comfortable configuration but it does allow the chickens to stay warm. Annmarie met me in Pendleton and arrived with gloves and a Pendleton woolen blanket. The pickup has a few foibles. I call them character traits. There is a large crack in the windshield, the vehicle has not been washed for at least two years, the ABS (antilocking brake system) is armed all of the time now so the brakes are a little touchy, the heat/air conditioner don’t really work, the headliner is held in place with gorilla tape and headliner tacks, the aftermarket seat covers are constantly trying to come off, there seems to be an intermittent short and the turn signal/brake light fuse has been replaced twice in the last two weeks, but they do work. The passenger door panel is loose and not attached to the door frame. The passenger window can only be rolled up/down on the passenger side door switches and there are no keys for the doors so it can never be locked. This door problem can be overcome with smooth fencing wire and time, but its annoying so I now just leave the rear window slider latch open all of the time for emergencies. Basically, it is a farm vehicle! The chickens survived the trip just fine and today when I went out to collect eggs I was able to count all ten of the new chickens! It was nice moving the chickens in the dark.

Back to fencing

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We have all kinds of good news, we got new cell phones! This might not seem like a big deal but we are not into the latest and greatest for most things and had always been a model or two behind on phones. We finally decided to upgrade, with some coercion from a friend, and you can see the difference in our picture quality for the blog! Annmarie took the above barn picture at twilight just before it got totally dark. We never could have done that before so I am super stoked about getting some pictures I never could have before due to sun going down or just not up enough yet. On the plus side the battery lasts from 0400-2200 without a recharge and the old one would no longer do that.

I had to go into the barn and add a board as one of the mothers managed to crawl through the wooden boards on the side of the creeper area. She was trapped when I came out to let them out of the barn Saturday morning. I found a board, hammered it in and cut the end off. This opening was too large anyways as the babies could sneak out of the area also. This should solve both problems. Our new panels for inside the barn are still not available to order yet and we have only had one more baby! The mother was so crazy we marked her for culling in the spring.

Mr Tex has been coming out during the week for a few hours a day and stringing fence. We are trying to get that last fence up. On Friday I was able to secure three more ton of alfalfa hay. I need to up my summer purchase a few ton. We unloaded a ton into the barn. We were then just going to back the flat bed trailer into the lamb shed and park it. That way we did not have to unload it. Now I failed to take into consideration that despite the brilliance of this plan I had never parked the flat bed trailer in the lamb shed before. This is because the door is only seven feet wide and the trailer is 8.5 feet wide, I discovered. So Mr Professional suggested we use the forks on the new tractor so we did not have to move the 80# bales by hand. This was a brilliant idea and we unloaded the trailer four bales at a time and dumped them into the lamb shed. It worked very well and was much nicer than doing it all by hand. The barn part was unpleasant enough that in the spring we are going to bring out the 20 foot hay elevator and weld on it until we get it working properly. I want to use it to stack the hay this next year. We left the trailer out in the barn lot so the rams and horse could clean it all up, they had it spotless by the next morning. We were able to go out to the new fence area and install some wooden stays before it just got too cold. The fog moved in and it was dang chilly!

The next day Mr Professional went inside the house and matched the ceiling texture. It looks great and once we paint it you will never know we patched it. I had plans to go down and work on the H brace at the far end of the new fence and the gate but as soon as I got alongside the fence I realized that not all of the clips were installed. Mr Tex had stretched out the smooth wire but not clipped it in place, the woven wire only had 1-2 clips on it and we needed to finish it anyways. So I started clipping the fence in and working my way toward the far end. I got the entire fence clipped in! Mr Professional came out and we worked on stays for a large portion of the fence. We still have about 50% of the fence to install stays on and one H brace and to hang the end gate and it will be ready for the cows. Hoping to have it done by the end of the week. The spring up in field number three has started back up! This is great news, It is so much water that it is now running above ground.

Fencing has reached the no stopping point!

Steve Hardin1 Comment

I am trying very hard to get this last fence finished before the weather stops us. Luckily, the weather just will not freeze. Friday, Mr Tex, Mr Rainman and Mr Professional all came out. We hit it hard and got the barn lot fence entirely rebuilt. We figured it had been ten years since I repaired it and it was in sad shape. The only reason the sheep had not been getting out of it and out into the wheat field to feast is that they are all pregnant, well fed and currently lazy. They will no longer be able to get out of the barn lot through the fence. We have a new gate installed in the barn lot out into the new alleyway. We also got the road gate hung going into the alley way. Mr Professional and I worked on getting T-posts pressed into the ground. This was not easy and the wind was blowing. I am deaf, he is deaf, the wind was blowing and the tractor was running. There was a lot of yelling and hand signals for hours on end.

Saturday, Mr Rainman and Mr Tex came out to continue fencing. The real problem is we have a wind advisory going all day for high winds. I dressed warmer on Saturday as the wind cut through my coat on Friday and I was cold most of the day. Mr Rainman and I continued to install T-posts while Mr Tex worked on getting the woven wire installed. The real problem Saturday was the constant strong wind, the wind was such that it blew all dust directly into my face. Luckily, I was wearing my new wraparound safety glasses so I was not getting dust in my eyes, just in my face. We spent five hours putting T-posts into the ground. I knew if we could get it done then there was no stopping the fence progress. All of the steps that require us to dig into the dirt would be completed. The rest can be done in freezing weather. At one point, Mr Rainman warned me that if I started to feel moisture falling on me it was from his snotty nose. This was not the most reassuring thought but it was true! The average wind speed for the day was 20 MPH with the highest gust at 55 MPH per our weather station. We quit early as soon as we had all the T-posts into the ground!

Sunday, I opted to start at 0800. It was raining when we started and in no time it started to snow, big wet heavy flakes. It was miserable on my hands, soaking wet leather gloves are no fun and eventually your hands get so cold that they get numb! Mr Rainman worked on getting clips installed on the woven wire that got put up yesterday and Mr Tex and I worked on installing the other H braces. We got three H braces completed and cut the cross pieces cut for the last two. The Kubota tractor almost slid off the road due to the mud and slant in the road, our hands felt like popsicles and we just decided by consensus that this was not going to happen. Christmas is just around the corner so between activities and holidays it will be January before we get at the fence again. I think three more solid days on the fence with three people to get it done. We got 3/10” of rain this morning.

No new baby lambs since mid week. It looks like the ram had to take another breather and rested up before he started working again.