We have walls

It took a few days, the heat was tremendous, the truck wasn't available, mistakes were made. But we definitely got the walls of our tiny home project up and the place looks livable (even if small).

I framed the thing in with 2x3 studs, saving about twenty-five percent of the weight and cost. Then decided to add a window in the front room to let more light in. The doors are on top of my truck, but these will have to wait until the roof and siding are nailed down, then plumbing, then electrical, then insulation, then interior walls, then flooring, then kitchen, then we tote the thing to the Farm and spend our first night there.

Tuesday the well guy comes and we get water.

All just as easy as I thought, nothing according to my plan or time table, still with little extra money.

This design included the idea that the upper portion of this would be 28 feet, but all we could get was 23.6 feet.
This only took a bit of air out of the plan, nothing too impossible.
The place feels roomy when standing inside of the frame.
Maybe we'll find a larger trailer frame for the second part.

You know. . .  Simple.

June 6, 2017, Tractor Day #6

Thanks to Kabota of Hillsboro we got our rental tractor Friday afternoon, along with a box scraper, and a brush hog mower. We took turns driving the thing around, being careful to keep a hand on the elevation lever of the brush cutter as we went since everything was covered in trash when we got it two years ago. There was also a tone of cut tree parts littering the ground where we cut trees. The brush hog caught stuff up as we mowed the weeds, making an awful sound and sometimes even stalling the tractor. Eventually we got all of the weeds around the place leveled out. Where we couldn't go with the tractor we used a weed whacker. 

We even got a few things organized. Logs from the trees we had cut got stacked in one place, the burn piles got consolidated, and  the massive compost heap we had been building for more than a year was turned over to cook down some more.

Toward the end of the eight hour rental there were few things left to do, so we cleaned up along the sides of the shipping container where the bulk of the unconsolidated trash was left buried in the weeds since Tractor Day #5. When we finished Day #5 we left a large pile of scrap metal which got hauled off which stopped us from cleaning up the area. I pushed all of the loose stuff into the big trash pile. (We'll handle the last big trash pile once we are living on the farm and cash is more readily available.)

This is a big picture if you click on it.

Our plan is to make the first tentative move to the Farm at some point near the end of this month. Of course this is tentative, since we haven't got the first trailer built yet. Siting our tiny home project is temporary, but will allow us to move the dogs to the Farm and remodel our house for a quick sale. The tiny home comes in two halves and we will live in this little thing until the farm house is built. Click here to find out about the tiny home project.

The first half of the project will sit on the black plastic in the picture above, near the power pole. We put an electrical meter on the pole and PGE hooked us up just two days ago. The second half of the tiny home project will sit to the left of the first and the dog run will be at the back. Eventually I will put up a hoop house to the left of the left side of the combined tiny home and use it for a place to build and store things.

Following the sale of our house in North Plains we will begin building the permanent farm house.

The farm house building will sit behind the shipping container and just to the left the group of trees to the left of the shipping container it when looking a the above picture. The container itself will eventually move to under an awning on the barn (which the person taking this picture would be standing directly in front of). 

Tractor Day #6 was a nearly complete success. We mowed down the seven foot high weeds, cleared the ground where we will put the trailers, and even got a nice gravel bed down for a driveway.

Our new Gravel driveway took  fifteen tons of gravel and a box scraper.
The driveway constitutes the first real improvement we have made to the property.
This is the first actual construction of an improvement.

The Creekside Farm project has finally begun to make some real headway. 

Click here to find our plan defined in broad strokes.

It is hard to believe that this entire thing was covered in seven feet of weeds and berries.
But when we started it was much, much, worse.

Our future home site

June 9, 2017 We have floor

This construction thing takes some time, but we're hitting goals (two and three a day) every day for the past week. Today is the beginning of Tractor Day 6, so we won't be working the tiny home project this weekend. But to get the project from tearing off the old floor to having the new one completed, in one week, is pretty good progress.

Tractor Day 6 begins

We have come a long way since e found Creekside Farm.

Today

Yesterday

We have subfloor

Tree stumps are fun

June 6, 2017 Chicken-man down

When I got back from my morning meeting, one of the Golden Wyandotte twins was gone. Henri Hudson and I looked around for quite a while before I had to give up and go to work.

After returning home I looked around some more, no luck, but I did find another delicious little egg for tomorrow's breakfast. I had work to do anyway, worth more than the five I lost. Ultimately this was a five dollar chicken, even if I did like the girl.

After returning home once more I decided to go to the neighbors and tell them to let me know. The first door answered told me that the Chicken had taken up residence with their 2 1/2 year old boy, who was bonded to the chicken. I sold her for five dollars.

Ann and I clipped wings and renamed Sara to Goldie. So now there is a Goldie, a blondie, and a Rhoda. And all is well.

The tiny home project phase one.

We are just past the "collect underpants" phase,  into new territory. But much too our surprise,  not all that different than where  we were before starting  the project.

Construction is something I am good at.  That,  and pinching every penny twice.

So first thing,  build a floor. 

Jume 4, 2017 Our Chicken's First Day

Since the Chickens just arrived last night, this seemed the perfect opportunity to begin telling their story with us. We had an eventful day.

We woke up at five thirty in the morning. Probably not too early for a chicken, definitely not early for me. Ann and I went out to look in on them at about seven in the morning, but couldn't let them out of the coop because there wasn't anything like a pen put up to keep them contained and out of the vegetable gardens. Our hounds were very excited at all of this new activity. We had brought them in from the dog run (adjacent to the Chicken run and separated by a slat wooden fence) because they just made entirely too much noise for that early on a Sunday morning. The chickens didn't seem to mind their relentless barking, whining, and baying, but the neighbors might have been, so they were left out in the front yard until later in the day. I brought each dog into the dog run after we let the girls out into their new enclosure, insisting that the dogs keep calm. Eventually I gave up and only let Henri Hudson stay for the show since he was being quiet. We figured they were all doing well enough for us to leave them for a while. The coop is plenty big enough, they weren't going to be cramped and we had a plan to go out to the Farm to pick up some of our metal fence posts at the same time as we stacked all of the wood I took off of the tiny home trailer last week.

After we got back to the house we found our first egg. This was a very exciting thing for both of us. An immediate success. Our first egg!

But this excitement could not last. We had to put up a wire fence up to separate the chickens from our vegetables and let the girls out. At that point we decided that our Rhode Island Red would be named Rhoda, The silver Wyandotte would be named Blondy, and the two gold Wyandottes would be name Sara and Dippity (after a set of calendar pinups I made about ten years ago). Blondy and the twins are sort of stand-off-ish, they don't like being picked up or petted, but Rhoda loves people and doesn't mind. So Ann carried her around a bit,while talking to the others. We spent some time with them, making sure they would find their way around. Rhoda strutted around, and looking through cracks in the back fence. The other three went to work right away scratching the ground and eating anything that looked worthy. We left the girls to their own business and got busy around the house for a while.

After lunch Ann went out to check on them and we discovered two of them were missing. Sara had jumped the fence into the dog run, Rhoda was just missing. We chased Sara back into the Chicken Run and went for a walk to find our missing Rhoda. It would be hard to describe where we found her except to say that she had jumped the back fence and found a nice hiding place in the neighbor's flower garden. Luckily for us she doesn't mind being handled and came home easily enough. After attaching another two feet of wire fence over the top of the back fence and the fence separating the Dog Run from the Chicken Run, the girls stopped trying to escape.

Meg, of Meg's Eggs, the woman who sold us the girls, had been feeding her flock on compost-able garbage out of the house, so Ann decided to give it a try. The spoiled strawberries, faded grapes, and watermelon rinds were a big hit. The girls ate everything they were given and this made Ann very happy. Eventually the girls helped get rid of some potato skins, and a few more grapes.  Meg tells us that they will eat practically anything, including meat, so I figure they will be fed quite a bit of the same stuff we normally put down the garbage disposal.

Toward eight in the evening we herded the girls back into the coop, thinking that they might not have the habit of going in on their own yet. They went quietly enough and we retired them for the evening. The girls had a good first day at their new home.

The other 2

2 of our girls

Our new Suburban farm

Thanks to Meg's Eggs we got four two years old hens last night. Three Wyandotte chickens (two gold and one silver) and a pretty Rhode Island Red, all still within the reasonable age making them good laying hens. Meg is a nice little farmer girl with a Phd. in some useful science, 85 chickens, about half a dozen goats, and some assorted turkeys. She had a good attitude toward sustainable living and grows nearly all of her own food on a few acres out near Milano, Oregon. She will probably miss her four girls, but probably knows we mean them no harm. It may take a few days for the dogs to quiet down and the hens to start producing, but it will happen.

Part of our plan to sell a micro farm in a sub-urban town near Intel.

We got a nice coop from Costco a week or so back. The manufacturer had marked them down from $660 to $295, so we snatched one up. The watering and feeding containers were less than thirty dollars at Coastal Farm, the feed is inexpensive too.

The chickens add a nice protein to the diet that the suburban farm proposes. Each chicken should give something like 200 eggs a year, making four chickens plenty of chickens for a small family. If the new owners don't want them, they come with us to our Creekside Farm in about two months.

Our garden is a neat little low maintenance design which might easily be expanded. It should yield about three weeks of produce a year, spread over a season, a has peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, Onions, little potatoes, strawberries, lettuces, peas, cucumbers, and beans, all in the ground and doing pretty well. I put a watering system together and covered the beds with weed blocking "plastic mulch" to keep things easy. I made the isles between the rows wide enough so that the plants can spill over a bit without making work difficult. 

Another Farm goal achieved, two yesterday alone. So things are starting to move pretty quickly, in a relative sort of way. We had planned on doing this when we decided our back yard last year, but it took a while due to weather and budget restrictions. I covered over the entire back yard with 6 mil black plastic to exhaust the seed bank in the soil and kill off as much of the grasses as I could. Then roto-tilled the rows neatly, keeping the soil packed in between. We should get a good harvest this year.

But this is not about the house and its little farm, this is about the Farm and its big dreams.

Tiny house project update

We have done the demolition on the trailer.  Doesn't seem like much,  but it took a whole day.

Next up is buying three Balance of the parts. This happens tomorrow and then construction begins.

After this comes another.

Life will go forward.

We have an awfully large compost pile at the Farm. It has been building, and shrinking (due to breakdown) for nearly a year now. Stuff we put there comes from my landscape maintenance business and includes some live plants as well as grass clippings and leaves.

In one place there seems to have been some Bearded Iris which has taken hold and given us flowers.

In two weeks we will have Tractor Day #6 and will turn our compost pile over to let it cook down some more. I expect the compost will eventually feed many of our first plantings. So maybe we should collect up the Iris and put it to good use.