Work-a-day doings on the farm

That was the title of a book I had as a kid, about two bears that bought a farm and decided to become farmers. I remember it fondly. Now you can find it on Google Books. :)

Sometimes I feel like Big Bear Dan and Little Bear Ben. Always something to learn and do. Fortunately I don't have to depend on supplying my own food for the winter...

Yesterday I had two young friends come by to spend a good bit of their day helping out. One cleaned the Airstream bathroom and kitchen to sparkling condition.

The other worked with me cutting down more than a dozen trees along the street. We managed to figure out a system that worked VERY well. I'd put a ladder up as high as I could reach on the tree, tie off a very long rope and then notch the tree with a chain saw so it would fall away from the pool area. Then we'd use the long rope attached to Eloise to pull over the tree. We started on the end of the row farthest from the pool and worked our way closer to it.

It was amazing how well it worked. I think these are swamp maples and they're not very strong and they snapped right where they were supposed to. It's a good feeling when a plan actually works. :) Once they were on the ground we'd cut off the top branches to be burned on the brush pile, the logs I'll cut up for firewood. The brush pile is now HUGE and may have to be rearranged before we light it, it's too close to some trees I really don't want to kill.

There are four trees along the road that are still on "my side" of the phone/CATV wires. Only one is close to the pool and will need special care coming down. All the others are either grown up between the two wires or are on the other side of the wires.

The ones that are not entangled and lean over the road will require a larger crew to drop. We'll need traffic control and more warm bodies to clear the road quickly. The trees that are between the two wires will be a problem. We'll have to get above the wires and cut off that portion, then cut just below the wires to free them from the entanglement, then cut at the normal height.

For anyone who cares: the reason they have to come down is two fold. The leaves in the pool are a maintainence issue, and their entanglement in the phone/CATV lines pose a potential hazard in an ice storm. We're leaving stumps and growth about five feet tall to maintain our privacy in that yard while a new line of bushes (lilacs and evergreens) and small trees (mostly dogwood) gets started behind them. Once the new screen has grown up, we'll cut the current trees flush with the ground.

The storage room isn't done yet, but we're pretty close. All that remains is mudding and painting and installing the lights. I'm going over today to put a coat of mud on and expect to be building shelves by Monday. Once shelving is in place, we'll give notice on our rental house and things kick into high gear to get ourselves moved onto the property.

We've mounted a fan on the south gable of the barn and it does a good job of taking the hot air off the top of the barn loft.

I put in twin unpowered vents on the north side to provide and "inlet" and relieve some of the heat problems there as well. We've caulked each seam, then painted the north end to match the south end. I'm not sure when we'll get to the trim, but that'll keep for a bit. The fellows who've been working with me the last few weeks did a great job on that.

If you compare to how it looked a few years ago, we've come a long way. :)

Around the yard we've cut and widened the path up to what I call the "privy corner" so that I can manuver my "used to be a pick up truck bed" trailer (which we've dubbed Gavin McLoad, fans of Love Boat will understand) up there easier. Some debris isn't worth taking to the county dump, might as well let it rot in peace.

Gavin is full of metal debris at the moment. A friend will soon come to pick it up to recycle, I hope. It's astonishing how much metal junk we've picked up around the place. Everything from old gutters to fence wire to hot water heaters to you name it.

Sal worked very hard to get the pool up and running this year. The filter needed extensive repairs and replacements and she did a great job with it. The weather has been a little cool for extensive swimming, but it's almost August so I expect that will change at some point.

The pontoon boats are now tucked into a corner of the property that is out of the way. Hope to get them off the ground and back on wooden blocks, & covered with a tarp, soon. Nice to have that part of the yard freed up again. If you saw "Gods and Generals" you saw some of these boats. They're part of a larger collection that is a recreation of a Civil War era floating bridge, which I'm storing for a friend.

Oh, and we've gotten new blades installed on Eloise so she's back to cutting grass and the lawns look marvelous. It took forever to get the right blades once one of the old ones snapped, but we finally managed. Now I just need to return the "wrong blades" to a very unresponsive seller on eBay...

We've had a fair amount of rain through the summer so far and things are still pretty green, which is great as long as I've got a good mower! :) Fortunately, now I have both the walk behind mower AND Eloise doing her thing. I mowed up on the hillside yesterday and it was so enjoyable to tool around up there and make sure the paths stayed open.

Well, time to hit the road and get spackle all over me. Like it was with the bears in the story, winter's coming. :)

Home stretch for storage room

We've got rough wiring in and most of the insulation up. Next is transporting sheetrock and getting it up, hopefully Thursday if all goes well. I think we'll put up plastic, then sheetrock ceiling, then lay unfaced insulation in atop that once there is something to support its weight.

Today, among other things, I mounted a roller to keep my shop door from acting like a sail in a high wind. Couldn't find what I wanted so I cobbled together something that I think will work well from some angle brackets and a non-marking caster.

We cut out all the old supply piping in the basement, also got the old pressure tank and water heater out into the yard, which cleared things up considerably.

Tomorrow is a 'desk work' day while I catch my breath and gather some supplies.

Once sheetrock is up and mudded and painted we'll build shelving and doors and then start moving stuff in!

Whoot!

Out with the Old...

As we prepare for the great move to the new place, some things have to happen at the old place. One of them is to clean out our moldy, damp old basement.

So on the first warm sunny day we've had in a while, I opened the two basement windows and started heaving stuff outside. (Ok, the fragile stuff I placed gently on the grass -next- to the window. But the junk got HEAVED.)

When I came outside to clear away space near the windows it looked like our basement had thrown up. :)

The rotten, moldy cardboard burned exceedingly well with the application of a bit of kerosene to get it in the mood. The plastic that I'm going to reuse right away (shelving, for example) got a scrub and a bath in bleach water. Several bags of trash and recyclables later, the basement looks very empty. Notice I didn't say clean. It's got leaks galore, so "clean" isn't going to happen very easily.

Bonus find: plastic dishes my folks used in their Airstream. Not sure if we'll use them or not in ours, but it was a nice "ah ha!" moment.

My dear wife has boxed up the rest of the house, so this is small potatoes compared to her herculanean task, but this image was striking, so here it is. :)

The storage room is on track to get finished up this week. I've got almost all the materials on site to finish. I do need some rafters and some insulation and some wall board, but they'll come.

The pool was about eight inches shy of being full before this big rain storm today. My calculations show that unless we got about eight inches of rain it won't fill the pool up. Have to call the pool water guy tomorrow and ask for a delivery. I WAS able to install a new face plate on the skimmer that has a "tupperware" type sealable cover. So theoretically this will be the last time I have to order a pool water delivery. It's supposed to eliminate the "drain down" in the fall. We'll see if it actually works.

Cheerz!

May 9 - Successful workday

Not many pictures from this day's efforts.

I was kept so busy assigning tasks, getting tools & materials and teaching things that I only got my camera out after everyone had gone.

This first pic is the framing for a storage room in the barn loft. It takes up a space roughly 12'x12' in the center of the barn, leaving the two ends free. The back will be furniture and "non-insulated" storage, the room will soon be insulated and fitted with wall board, etc. so it's not freezable next winter, and the front will be a sort of office/studio space.

While my male builder-type friends were busy in the barn, some others were completing the demolition of the second floor bathroom. Once I get the yard trailer street legal, I've got a LOT of stuff to take to the dump.

My younger friends kept busy hauling materials and trimming hedges. There are a LOT of hedges to trim here and if you don't stay ahead of them you can spend days raking up the clippings. The cutting is pretty easy with the trimmer, but the raking and hauling takes forever. They did yeoman's work, that's for sure.

I didn't get fancy and join these two shots together, but you get the idea.

In case you're wondering about my "ground cover," that's old carpeting that I put down so I wouldn't have to mow the walkway out to the barn. Most of it came out of my church's sanctuary when we remodelled last year.

This last week's efforts have been aimed at getting the framing finished up. (Still need ceiling rafters) Next week I can begin wiring and insulating the room and get wall board put up. Then shelving goes in and our "old house" can disgorge it's store of boxes, and we can get moved over here for good! Woo hoo!

MANY thanks to my many friends who have helped on this project. Couldn't have done it without you.

Stay tuned, we're getting closer!

D.

Miscl. pix

Here's a few pix of things I'd mentioned before, I think.



The dining room ceiling, removed on the recent work day.

Progress on replacing the fascia on the west side of the barn. I hope to get back to this next week after I make a trip to NJ to pick up some antiques from my sister.

Now that the barn stairs are in, I'm really hoping to get the storage room in the barn fixed up pronto.

I got back from a church retreat this afternoon about 4:30 and popped over to WH and spent a VERY enjoyable two or three hours mowing around the property this afternoon. It was so much fun to wheel that tractor around and get stuff done!

A few days ago I had cut down a willow tree which had grown up in the septic drain field. Today I was able to drag it over to the burn pile with the tractor and cut it up a bit more so it wasn't flopping outside my "burn zone." What is so satisfying about dragging around half a tree? I don't know, but it does give a good feeling of accomplishment.

I flooded my gas powered chain saw when I was trying to start it, so I hauled out the Alligator again. It made short work (pun intended) of that willow, let me tell you. The more I use it, the more I like it.

Off to shower and bed. I run the AV at church tomorrow morning, so I have to be up and out early.

Cheerz!

Doug

Progress!

Today saw more tangible progress than any day in the last few months except the work day.

We ran up the flags first thing to see them wave in the breeze today. For those who haven't seen it, the yellow and green flag has an applique of a walnut seed and leaves on it.

Then we tried to figure out how to connect a trailer light plug to the truck so that I can tow a trailer ok. That didn't work out so well. The plugs under the back of my truck didn't do what I thought they should do. :( So, we abandoned that project until I can research that one a bit more.

We thus turned to the other high priority item for the day's agenda and began to fix the stairs to the barn loft. My young friend Charlie and I were able to "dismount" the stair stringers and solve a puzzle that blocked progress a while ago. For some reason the stringer in the middle was one inch higher than the ones on the outside when I tried to assemble the stairs a few weeks ago. But everything checked out to be dimensionally the same. I considered that they were bowed but when I tried to sight along them they appeared to be pretty straight.

Once we took down the three stringers and laid them atop one another on the grass the problem was immediately apparent. They were cut last October and the lumber had shrunk over the winter as the wood dried, making the two outside stringers "bow" towards the top, where they were notched for the treads. Thus they "sank" an inch relative to the center stringer that stayed straight. Lesson learned. If you cut it, assemble it. :) The reason the center one didn't bow was because there were notches cut into the bottom of it for the spacers that tie the three together. That relieved the tension on that side of the board, so it didn't bow.

D'oh. I should have known all that. Live and re-learn... :) In this shot you can see the bow in one of the outside stringers. Fortunately, I think I can cut them shorter and reuse them in other parts of the house later on.

So, off to the local lumber yard and home again, with two new stringers. We got out the saw horses and used the center stringer as a pattern to cut the two new ones. Charlie did a good job with the cutting and we soon were able to mount the three, assemble the spacers and begin laying treads. Charlie cut treads in the shop on the miter saw and brought them over to me, I'd screw them down and it all went like clockwork. I love my Hitachi imact driver gizmo. That thing makes driving screws SOooooo easy.

We were able to pack up and roll out of there about 4:30 and spend some time over to my friend Todd's. He had some dead limbs in some trees in his yard and we helped him cut them out and saw them up for firewood. Charlie did a good bit of the tree climbing but we had a hard time keeping Todd out of the tree on the second one. ;) We mainly used my Alligator electric chain saw/lopper. It looks like a hokey Harry Homeowner tool, but that thing ate through some pretty big branches like nobody's business. The safety aspect of having the chain saw bar encased in some shields is a GREAT idea on someone's part. Made us feel very confident when cutting up high in a tree. I had to use the chain saw a few times but it went off without incident.

Todd's family invited us to dinner and a good time was had by all. I'm headed to shower and bed and will sleep soundly tonight! :)

There are a few more pix at this address:

http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/album/571365116Axzobk?vhost=home-and-garden

Doug

Eloise lives!

I'm a very blessed man. Yesterday my very kind friend, Dan, brought a friend, Merritt, along and we worked on the tractor, Eloise, to get her running again. Eloise is a 1953 International Farmall Super A. She'd languished from a bit of neglect the last year or so, I'm ashamed to say. Her starter had stopped, her coil had popped, her tires droped; she'd just sort of got that run down feeling. The picture at right will take you to a few larger sized images of her.




I'd been so busy with urgent things that the important thing of getting her running kept getting shoved to the back burner. So Dan's birthday gift to me was to bring over Merritt, who's a mechanic of the old school, and get her going. It took us four hours, but we managed to get her fired up. She still needs a major tune up (parts are ordered and on the way) and fluids changed. Her mower deck needs a major clean/sharpen/balance/lube job, but we're well on our way.



I had bought a water pump for her some time ago and discovered when I went to install it that it didn't clear the fan blades. With Merritt's encouragement I went at it with the grinder and took the end off the shaft that stuck out in the way. So now I can get that installed and put all of the sheet metal back on that I'd left off for so long. I'm MOST grateful for this delightful present.



Now it will take me only a short while to cut the grass instead of hours and hours with the walk-behind mower. Now I can rearrange the pontoon boats on the property to a much less visible position. Now I can cut down trees along the road and drag their carcasses up the hill to be cut up.



Hurrah for Eloise!

This week's busy-ness and the rainy weather has kept me from the stair project, but here's hoping I can get to it tomorrow (Thursday) or Monday. Two trips with school kids Friday and Saturday and a packed day Sunday. Never a dull moment around here!

I need to get those stairs finished pronto because I've got to bring down from NJ a piece of furniture next week and it's a very nice old antique that I don't want to juggle up to the loft by hook or by crook.

April showers are bringing May flowers today, but the weather is supposed to improve tomorrow. :) Hope your week is bright.

Doug

Work of Easter week

I'm still getting over the effects of this last bronchitis episode, so today (Good Friday) was a "stay down and rest" day but this week I was able to get a few things done, with the help of friends.

First off, a view of the dining room ceiling sans plaster, thanks to our friends last weekend.

Fortunately, this exposed some wood rot in the floor of the existing upstairs bathroom. That room is due for gutting and rebuilding too, so this should not be a problem now that we know it's there. The old galvanized steel pipe will be going away too. Part of this bathroom will become the new laundry room so I intend to use some of the DWV piping for that, but install new PEX supply lines.

My friend Ed came over Thursday and we tore up more of the kitchen floor. That new Sawzall really eats through those 2" boards like crazy, a real joy to use. We got the debris out to the burn pile via wheel barrow and it went up nicely, along with the lathe and paneling we pulled off the walls on the last workday. We've had a lot of high winds since the workday and I had to go around the yard and retrieve several pieces of the paneling. :)

We also got a good chunk of the fascia on the west side of the barn ripped off and replaced. It was as old and rotten as the two ends had been, but it protected the structure beneath it, all was sound wood. Getting this installed and the guttering up will help to dry out the barn floor during the spring rains.

We were short about four feet of fascia (how did THAT happen?) so I went for some extra fascia board, which comes in 12' lengths which meant the back door of the truck was open a bit to let the board stick out. As I turned a particular corner on the way home the charger, extra battery and case for my impact driver fell out of the back of the truck. I heard the noise and stopped but didn't see it, figured it was an old suitcase falling over in the back of the truck and went on. By the time I realized the loss and went back someone had picked it up. So we had to halt fascia installation for the day. However, another 20 minutes or so of work and it will be up. I went online today and found the right replacement stuff pretty cheap and it should be here by early next week. It helps to have the right tool for the job and I'm not sure how I got along before I had this one.

Earlier in the week I'd started to work on the stairs to the barn loft, however I've run into a snag which I'd love to figure out, but don't think I'll bother to. The three stringers measure out the same, dimensionally. But when I put them in place, the run of the middle stringer is 1" higher than the run on either of the other two. And the rise on the right hand one seems to be one inch farther back towards the barn. The base pad and top header all appear to be level and square to each other, so there is no detectable deviation there I can see. I'm not sure how that is possible, but I feel like I'm working on an Escher painting somehow. Monday I'm going to take them down and lay them on the ground on top of one another and cut SOMEthing to make them all match. This is one of those "Gordian knot" things. I'd love to figure out the "why" of it, but will settle for a functional solution at this point.

Thursday I was able to "let fly" our new homestead's flag, made by my wife's cousin. It is a wonderful "house warming" gift and looked good up on that pole. Unfortunately the wind wouldn't blow when I wanted a picture so I had to drape it over the back fence to give you a peek. It's an outline of some walnut nuts and leaves on a yellow background. It has the same color scheme as a Civil War hospital flag. Not sure why that amuses me so, but I really enjoy the flag.

In preparation for the relaying of the new kitchen floor, I've been doing some reading on what sort of underlayment will be needed. The existing floor is 2" thick, joist to surface, so I've got lots of room to build a nice stiff floor to lay tile on. Looks like 3/4" plywood subfloor, 3/4" underlayment and 1/2" ceramic tile will about meet the existing floor flush. It's a bit tricky because you have to allow the plywood to give a bit with swings in temp and moisture, but sounds like it can be done. It's not the optimum installation, but looks like it might work.

And spring is here! Flowers in the old "sumac patch" north of the barn are popping up! No sign of the sumac coming back, thank goodness!

Larger pics are online here: http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/album/570670508DWVwkR

Hope you enjoy this brief sum of the week's news. Happy Easter to all!

Doug

First Big Workday of 2009 - April 4

Today was a resounding success. Few minor injuries, nothing serious or major. Lots of work accomplished. Great weather and good friends. :)

We arrived about 8:45 to find a few folks there champing at the bit, ready to go. We soon had the doors open, the power on and everything necessary to the day's work laid out.

The first order of business was to back the utility trailer up to the front door so we could carry debris out and pile it there. All the wood paneling and furring strips were on the trailer and hauled to the burn pile by about 11AM.

A little before lunch we laid down some of the paneling on the dining room floor and began to pull down the plaster ceiling. The dust flew and there were smiles behind those dust masks, I could see. I stayed upwind at a safe distance. (Recent fight with severe bronchitis, fyi.)

We took a nice break for lunch, Pizza Hut pizza and liquid refreshment then went back to it.

The trailer bed was soon full with the ceiling and we carted that off behind the chicken shed and dumped it by about 3:30. For some reason I don't understand the living room ceiling took up more space than the kitchen ceiling, even though it's smaller. We must have carted a bunch of the kitchen debris to the dump at some point. But I don't remember that. Oh, well. We've got LOTs of busted up plaster now! :)

Two intrepid helpers, Tim and Charles, stuck around another couple hours and we removed the bathtub from the existing upstairs bathroom and slid it into the back of the utility trailer. When we get around to having goats and sheep it'll make a great watering trough. I thought it was cast iron but it turned out to be steel. We were a good bit surprised to find out how poorly the seals were made for the plumbing connections. They appear to be just doped up and slid into place, none of the locking rings were tightened up. The connections were probably inacessible behind the ceiling at the time the bathroom was done. Amazing to me that it never seems to have leaked though. The stool and wash basin still have to come out, but we got the lion's share of it. Amazing how much removing some walls opens up a room.

All in all, a great day's work accomplished, we're well on our way!

Next work day will be May 9, and we'll probably start around 10AM since the night before is the Jr-Sr. Banquet at school. Mark your calendar for June 13 also, starting 9ish or perhaps earlier, depending on weather that day.

Here's the picture album, click on the picture on the right. Too tired to tweak them, they're in the raw.

Doug

2009 - Spring Sprint

It's been seven months since I last posted here, time to update, don't you think? :)

Since I last wrote we've winterized the pool after only having it open for two weeks. But the good news is that it shouldn't take as long to get it functioning this spring.

We've rebuilt the south end of the barn, adding two new windows and a door, plus a small deck/landing. A set of stairs was to go in before now, but the weather got so cold we had to hold up on that.

Than my shoulders became "frozen" (adhesive capsulitis) and I've had a rough time getting them loosened up again. The three words I hear used repeatedly when I read about recovery from this are "long, slow, painful." So far they've been right, but we keep slogging away.

I've spent a lot of time shopping for new toys, er, tools and am ready to tackle the house again this spring. We need to get it finished by August so we're doing all we can to meet that deadline. We've cut the project in half for a number of reasons. We're going to build it in two stages, the north wing will go up first since it provides the master bedroom/bath and two car garage. When time and funds allow we'll build the great room and the library out the back (west wing).

One snag I ran into last fall was that when I began to strip off the flooring on the kitchen floor it smelled really bad. The animals the previous owners left alone in the house had soiled the floor down through three layers of linoleum and two layers of sheet vinyl and into the wood floor. So I've begun to rip out the floor in the kitchen right down to the joists. My new 15 amp Sawzall made short work of the 2" thick flooring. 5/4" subfloor was rough sawn random width poplar perpendicular to the joists, then narrow strip pine on top of that. Then glue, tarpaper, three layers of linoleum tiles, a layer of sheet vinyl, a layer of luan, then a final layer of sheet vinyl. To get the sawzall blade started my new Hole Hog bored a 1 1/8" hole through it all without breaking a sweat. :) I'm lifting it off in sections about 16" wide and four feet long. Small enough to lift off fairly easily and big enough to not have lots of little chunks to be handled. I found that if I cut mid way between the two joists I can miss the cross bracing and cut along pretty quick.

I hate to cut up this lovely old poplar, but removing it whole isn't an option at this point.

I also recently acquired a Paslode nail gun and a Porter-Cable palm nailer to assist with the construction phase. Driving nails the old fashioned way isn't in the cards with these shoulders. May need to upgrade my compressor to drive them, but we'll see.

You can see a few pix I shot today at this link:

http://community.webshots.com/album/570670508DWVwkR?vhost=community

Thanks for reading and we'll make an effort to keep everyone posted as we move along.

Doug