New office

Rooms are always a work in progress

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Annmarie’s laser cutter died so we got another one, this one is upgraded and will do circular items and will cut thicker material and can etch into metal directly. It has a water cooled laser. We did not really compare any measurements so when it arrived we realized it was significantly larger than her old one. I had to build a table top to go onto the top of the old TV stand we are using as the base. We also had an old Victrola cabinet in there for the 3D printer but they both would not fit. Gingerman and I made them fit but it was not pretty and did not pass the quality inspection later done by Annmarie. We agreed that a shelf for the 3D printer would take up less space and I had kept an old table leaf that I was able to cut into a shelf. I used the leftover wood from the table top to cut the other three shelves out. We may put shelves under the 3D printer but I will wait until Annmarie requests those. She will need to use the space for a while before those will be used. I may but a narrow one directly under the printer so she can put her filament rolls on it. I will need to use book ends or build some so that they don’t roll off.

I had to run ductwork along two walls to accommodate the fumes. I decided that cutting another hole in the wall to the outside and moving the exhaust fan and power was not going to work for me. I might have to do this three more times and I did not five holes in the wall. I was able to use some low profile dryer venting and keep it fairly close to the wall. I taped all the joints so the exhaust fumes stay inside the duct. This laser has a really good exhaust fan so between it and the one on the outside of the office the fumes will get moved right out and the longer path should not be much of an issue. There is a lot of push/pull action happening in regard to the exhaust.

My plants on the breeze porch are doing very well. When I got this plant it was six inches high. The only thing I seem to be having trouble with is starting the new African violets. I have always had trouble with it but this year I have not been successful. I ordered some root stimulator and hopefully that will solve my problems. I am starting to root new plants so I can get them ready for Christmas. I usually take at least 30 plants into work as presents for the ER staff. I have a couple of new plants so I wanted to offer a little more variety. I add a few plants every year to the collection. I have enough room for another six African violets and was hoping to fill it up this year. They tend to be fairly expensive when buying them at the store.

Farm update, spring is coming

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The progeny badgered me this week to get back in the groove and update the blog. It has been crazy around here and during Lent, Annmarie is super busy so I pick up farm work. We have both gotten sick. Luckily, we are super careful to keep quarantine protocols in place so if one of us starts getting sick we make sure to not be sick at the same time. I did get a bunch of little things knocked out. I had purchased a carved wooden chest several years ago and I took five hours to scrub at it with Murphy wood soap, blue non scratch pad, two different stiff small brushes, sponge and lots of towels. I just drenched sections of the carving in soapy water and started scrubbing away at it to get the dirt and grime off. I probably need another five hours to really get it clean but the time I spent got all of the obvious stuff and brought out a lot of details. I also soaked it in lemon oil. I had so much oil on it that I had to go back in an hour and dry it off again. It is fairly painstaking work but it did turn out nice.

Annmarie has the alpaca literally eating out of her hand now. She keeps treats in her trunk and feeds the alpaca randomly when she comes home. They all know not to bug her when she goes out to her car as they never get fed then. Since it’s random she is able to call them and they come running for treats! She has the three young siblings tamed down the most. The little brown one just lets her pet it all over. I can pet it’s neck and cheeks only. The plan is to shear the alpaca sooner than later. Which reminds me, I need to send off the blades to be sharpened! I will do that this week.

I started looking at Craigslist again. I had a friend who used to watch it all the time for me and let me know when something popped up that I may want. He is no more and I have not done much with it since. It’s a good way to see what people are asking for their livestock and to see if there are any deals that I may be interested in. I happened to spot someone selling Tamarack 50” wooden fence stays and was able to go out the next day and pick up 300. Between the great used fence and these stays I managed to pick up this winter I am almost set for fence building. I have seen an add for used metal T posts but I cannot use my tractor to drive in the used posts. They bend about 50% of the time so I have to waste too much to make it worth it. I simply do not want to drive 500 T posts into the ground by hand. I am too old for that. Plus, I don’t want to spend a week driving posts in the ground, as if my body would tolerate that!

I had purchased these plastic stackable bins for Annmarie’s office to hold her laser wooden sheets but they turned out to be too narrow to hold very much wood. Annmarie had talked to me about building something or else using a bunch of table tops and short legs from IKEA to make it. I didn’t do either one but after time I realized she was right. I also realized that I was stacking up extra plywood as the mud room build continued. So Mr Rainman and I spent a few hours and made her a shelf that was specific to her needs and could store boards flat. It is fairly heavy as it is made out of plywood and real wood. I don’t think it would have been fun to move if we had added another 4-5 shelves. Luckily, she needs a spot for the printer and laminator.

The sheep are making us crazy. We have three more ewes that need to give birth. We have one set of twins in a jug now that are only three days old. The damn chickens are laying eggs in the barn in random spots. I have two raccoons that are making rounds through the barn at night. I had a late Wednesday and didn’t go out to the barn until after 2000. I spotted two huge raccoons and instantly turned around to get a pistol, by the time I got back there was only one and it was fast! They are sneaking in and eating the cat food. The weather should be warming up soon and I can cut back on feeding all of the animals as the grass will start growing. It rained 3/100 today and 1/100 yesterday. My hope is we can get warmer temperatures and some constant rainfall in low doses. I don’t like it when we get more than 1/4” at a time. It doesn’t all get absorbed into the ground. The puppy is finally out of the cone of shame. We had to go through three cones and 3/4 roll of duct tape to keep them on her. Her foot finally healed once she quit licking it all of the time.

We will be sorting cows and sheep next week and fertilizing fields. Spring is soon to be here.

Winter works

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It is officially winter now, despite the record high temperatures. We have had over half an inch of rain in December already. The new mud boots are coming in handy now that the barn lot is a pig pen. The nice thing is it has been so warm that about half the barn lot has sprouted grass and that is really cutting down on the mud. I had plans on getting the barn door fixed but the mud and tractor combination is not very exciting so I am waiting until it gets freezing cold to go work on the door, which is its own special kind of hell. But it’s better than getting stuck in the mud with the tractor.

Mr Rainman was able to get the office slider doors done one rainy day. I had not seen them as I am not in the wife’s office very often. But I did have to go in her office today and the doors look amazing! There is almost nothing left to complete in the office, I still have to fix the trim around the cords going to her router up the wall. It is truly the only thing left, except for building the shallow shelves on her central table arrangement so she can sort her new wood sheets out easier. But after that it will be completed!

We spent one whole day doing nothing but cleaning up the old house and machine shed. The organizing was sorely needed and had not been done in quite a while. We even managed to get the old DeWalt radial arm saw from the 40’s moved out of the old house and into the old chicken coop. That meant we were able to move the toolbox from my future room into the project area. We also moved one upright cabinet. The cabinet has a lot of rust on the bottom half but it is an upper and lower piece so I think we can ditch the lower piece and move the upper piece out into the machine shop. This will open up some more space and allow me to move the last big thing from my future craft area. Once I get that space emptied I can finish getting the electrical outlets wired and the light installed. Once that is done then I can finish insulating the last two walls then put up the inside wood.

After Thanksgiving we decided that more external light was needed over the bridge. We purchased some rope lights and were going to install one on each railing. The wind and cold meant that Mr Rainman and I only managed to get one side installed before calling it quits. After it got dark I was glad we only had one side installed. One was incredibly bright, I cannot imagine how bright two would be. We are going to see if we can use a Wi-Fi controlled electrical plug to control the bridge light. We can program the plug or turn it on/off with our phones when needed. We have not tried it out to see if the Wi-Fi extends that far out into the yard yet.

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…

Catch up

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Last weekend was utilized as catchup time. After being gone for a couple of weeks we still had more things to complete to get ready for summer. Annmarie went and got two huge pots for our front entrance. We have a few volunteer lavender plants coming up in our patch and wanted a place for them. We are also going to put a wooden post in the pots so we can hold open the porch gates. We really only need them closed when the sheep are in the yard. Both dogs know how to open them both ways! So they are not a deterrent to them when it comes to getting on the front porch. The planters were heavy and did not provide a great spot to grab onto when moving them.

On Friday I drove over to LaGrande and picked up our second ram (Remie). I just put the animal pickup enclosure on and he rode in that. We want the sheep to lamb in a timely fashion and believe that if there is competition then all of the ewes will get impregnated in a single cycle. So we will have 2 rams and 45 ewes. We put both rams in the corral for about 36 hours to make sure they would cohabitate nicely. There was a lot of butt sniffing but they never fought. We let them out with the ewes and they are doing just fine. I cannot see that they are doing their job but we will know in five months if they are.

Saturday was spent cleaning up around the farm. The footings for the bridge were started. They have to be dug out first then I can build the concrete wooden footings and put some metal in the hole then it can be filled with concrete. We are going to use my small electric concrete mixer when we do it. It will only mix about 200# of sackrete at a time. It’s going to take a while to get the footings poured.

The sprayer had to be cleaned out and set back up on the tractor. Mr Rainman worked on that. We had a couple of plugged nozzles from the last usage and he went through the entire setup and got it all cleaned up. He also greased and filled all tractor fluids on both tractors. Mr Flow is going to work on cutting thistles down along the back creek. It’s not glorious work but it needs to be done. Once the thistles are knocked down then he can clean out the chicken coop.

I was pretty sure we had a chicken predator as I could only find five chickens once we got back from vacation and was only getting one egg a day. So on Sunday, Mr Rainman and I worked on skirting the old house. I crawled under it first to make sure there were no dead animal carcasses. Lo and behold there was a passel of live chickens. We chased them out by me tossing rocks and Mr Rainman beating on the outside skirting. Otherwise, I would have been crawling and chasing chickens under the building. Once the chickens were out we locked them up in the coop and proceeded to skirt the building. We also built an enclosure around the laser vent fan to keep the weather off of it. Once that was done we built a rain lean to over the fan enclosure and outlet to prevent water from getting on any of it. This was supposed to happen a while ago but got put on the back burner.

I have started working on the freezer room floor. I need to cut diagonal floor supports to make the floor level. The only problem was I burned up the table saw blade and I have multiple replacements for the radial arm saw and hand skilsaw, but none for the table saw! I need to cut five more and we can then shim the floor level and get it down. This is the next big thing for the old house remodel. Once the floor is in I can slap up the wall from scrap plywood I have saved for this purpose. I can then move all three freezers and install some shelves into the room. Once that is done its onto my room! I think I have enough wood scraps for the walls to be sheeted so its pretty much installing two doors and finish the wiring and insulate two walls. I expect it to take me a year or more to finish my side. I really need to just focus on getting all of the switches and outlets installed.

Due to the heat I had to come up with a way to keep water and Gatorade cold. The front spring is 40F year round so I took an old broken bucket and placed it in the ditch and filled it with drinks. It doesn’t keep them ice cold but they are cool and easy to drink plus its free.