February 28th, 2020 Leap Year Week

The last week of February turned out to be very nice. Not much for rain until late Friday, very little cold or wind. Great working weather. The week started off pretty easy, but got a lot harder.

On Monday morning the Structural and Plumbing Inspector came out to look a under house plumbing and sub-floor frame jobs, which were the last of the foundation phase of the Farmhouse build. He gave us a bit of advice and told us about a few places where work was still needed. But he passed our inspection, allowing us to begin the next phase of building.

It took the rest of the day to order the parts for the next bit. The best price we could find on floor boards was at Home Depot at around $850, about half of Parr Lumber, two thirds of Lowes best price. The insulation came from a Craig's List warehouse vendor who sold us what we needed for $950.  All totaled we paid $1800 for what might have cost us $3100 and saved another two hundred by using our big trailer to pick the stuff up. This hit the fifty-percent goal while hitting one hundred percent of expectations. We moved everything to the home site on Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning we tore into the short list of work the Building Inspector had given us. We added some vents to the foundation and put in a Radon removal pipe under the moisture barrier. It took all morning but left the rest of the day to try and get some floor boards down.

Because of the rain we are pulling a large plastic cover over the entire floor to keep the floor boards and insulation as dry as we can until the roof is put on. Wednesday we got the first four foot course in place by about five in the afternoon. We are putting the insulation in as each floor board covers it up. Doing it this way allows us to get the whole job done in one single pass. Wednesday had pretty well exhausted us both. The heavy lifting and constant climbing around wore us out.

Thursday morning we had scheduled a trip into town for doctor's visits, egg selling, and grocery shopping. Despite our intention to get home and put down more flooring in the afternoon it seemed we were too tired out to go back to work. We took a ride up the Banks-Vernonia Trail instead.

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Click on this for a bigger image.

The Banks-Vernonia State Trail is twenty-one miles long and runs from Banks (about three miles South of us), over an old timber railroad bed, through the Coastal foothills, to Vernonia (about eighteen miles north of the Farm). Some days we use the Trail to ride into Banks for supplies. It's only three miles into town and the Trail doesn't cross any automobile traffic at all. But most days we ride North toward the  Buxton Trailhead.

Leaving Manning we go out onto the
Prairie in full sun.

The Banks-Vernonia Trail doesn't cross traffic much. There is a busy street crossing at Manning, one gravel road crossing between there and Buxton,  and one road crossing at Buxton. But you won't see much automobile traffic until you reach Top Hill Trailhead and have to cross Highway 47.

Once you start uphill toward Buxton the climb is pretty steady. We have e-bikes, so climbing hills is no more difficult than riding on flat ground. We used the batteries hard, trying to keep from working our sore muscles. It was a very happy trip and as we climbed the 800 feet it got colder at nearly every landmark.

We brought light coats and winter gloves but had stowed them in our bikes' carriers. At the Farm it was sunny and about sixty degrees. For Oregonians this is shirt sleeve weather.

At the five and one-half mile marker the warmth was broken up a bit with cool zones coming at random. Once you cross the Manning-Buxton Road the trail turns shady and you enter fairly dense forest.

A nearly perfect day on The Banks-Vernonia Trail

Winter is usually cold in the shade, but we were riding without coats and it was very nice where the sun shone through the trees.

Crossing the road from Manning to Buxton
you begin to climb up to Stubb Stewert State Park.

The air alternated between Oregon Spring warmth and late Winter chill.

This is called the Hampton Turn.
There's a picnic bench on the trail at the turn.

Near the Buxton Trailhead while riding North there is a fork in the road.
The right side is the Horse Trail leading down to the valley below the Tressel.
The left side takes you across the Tressel.

The Tressel is about six feet wide.
Meeting oncoming bicycle traffic means slowing down.

The Tressel is at the Buxton Trailhead.
A wonderful place to go.

Under the Tressel is a nice semi-private picnic area.
The walk down is steep, but worth the climb back up.
The climb down is not for people with limited strength.

Just up from Buxton Trailhead we entered
what we callthe Land of the Giants.

       

Stubb Stewert State Park is a nice place
to turn back for home.

Headed back from Stubb Stewert into a Birch grove.

By the time we got to LL Stubb Stewert State Park we had already stopped to put on coats and gloves, but it was still quite cold in the shade. We turned at the crossing for home and warmer weather. A large dose of hot tub therapy, a few beers, some dinner, and an early bed time worked well for fixing what was wrong with us. On Friday we got two more courses of flooring and insulation put down without wrecking ourselves.

The end of our dry weather came in at around four on Friday, so we covered the house up and are waiting for clear weather to return.

The weather outlook is a rainy Saturday and a return to drier weather by Monday. We are crossing our fingers that we can finish the floor by Tuesday and begin buying parts to put up the Farmhouse' walls.

February 21, 2020 Plumbing completed

We had a great week, a bit hard on the body, but great. The weather was wonderful, fifty-something degrees and dry. Perfect weather for climbing through the floor joists and putting the plumbing system in for our Farmhouse build. No mud to speak of is always good news. We spent the week installing the plumbing system under the floorboards of the new Farmhouse.

Plumbing is like electricity in some ways. The building codes are archaic, hard to read, and there isn't much you can do to find information easily. And like electrical circuits you don't know if it works until you turn it on. We looked at a ton of YouTube videos, and did dozens of Google searches to find pertinent information. Eventually we got enough knowledge together to buy parts.

The County man who came out last week seemed concerned about our plan to use copper pipe everywhere. He worried over the probability of leaks developing immediately from bad welds. But copper has always be my go to material because it is easily worked and there are few tools required. But when the Building Inspector voiced his concerns I looked around for possible better stuff. We found PEX.

PEX piping is wonderful stuff. Pipe is inexpensive and the fittings are fairly inexpensive. Tools are a pipe cutter and a clamping tool with an indicator to tell you when you have the clamp tight enough. You can buy the stuff in three colors: red, white, and blue, so color coding hot and cold sides make mistakes much harder to make. All said and done, the PEX we put in cost half as much as copper and went together three times faster, all with nearly no chance of failure. The waste pipes were a different story.

There is a whole lot of stuff I didn't know about the simple task of piping the waste out from under a house. The need for venting the drains was a new experience. Luckily for us there are a lot of videos and images of the work out there, so cobbling a plan together only took a week or so. Figuring out the size of pipe to use was a matter of picking through the building code, but this only took a few days to find.Figuring out how to make the pipes slope downward at the right angles took a few days and three attempts. Until it is inspected we won't know if we got it right, but it looks good. Plumbing is hard to conceptualize and do, but it is also very hard on the body too.

The week of climbing around the floor joists took a hefty toll on us both. It is hard work just moving around in the space and each move was a chance to bang yourself up.  Ann sustained a fairly nasty set of bruises on everything from the waist down . She will be healing up for a few weeks.

On Monday we'll get inspected, the sub-floor framing and plumbing. So the last thing we did after the plumbing was to cut a hatch in the sub-floor frame so that we can get under the house once finished. Not a big job, but figuring out where to put the hatch was a bit of a thought experiment. We eventually settled on the hallway because nearly all of the house where the pipes are is easily accessible there. Coincidentally the attic access is right above the crawlspace access. I like symmetry.

Once we pass the inspection we can begin putting down floor boards and putting up walls. the next flight of inspection will come once the roof trusses are up and wiring in. It will look like a house. The next bit is fun. Progress is being made every day. The coming of Spring, and its good weather will only make things easier.

February 14, 2020 A fairly nice week

St. Valentine's Day has come once more. We don't do much about it, but here it is anyway. The week went by quickly and quite a bit got done.

The sub-floor frame nearing completion.

First things first. The house build is going very well. On Monday the twenty-four foot beam we ordered came in and we wasted no time bringing it to the Farm and laying it on it's piers. We had about a third of the frame laid in last week, but this week saw the entire sub-floor frame put together. Each board in the sub-floor framing is 2x12 wood and about half of it is sixteen feet long and very heavy. But taken one at a time to work went smoothly and with few mis-steps. The nailing went well, but each nail took its appropriate time and sufficient number of blows. Fifteen pounds of nails went into the frame, the hammer getting heavier with each one.

Following the final board being laid down, on Thursday we began moving toward installing the plumbing that goes under the floor. We drilled holes through most of the joists and pulled the PEX piping through them. The plumbing system is small and very simple to do, but there are quite a few parts to it. The PEX system is very easy to use and much easier than copper. PEX is a system of poly pipes, connectors, and clamps which takes little effort to put together and doesn't tend to have hidden leaks. Unlike the water system, the septic system is a bit more abstract.

Aside from learning to do septic tanks and drain fields, designing a waste system is new to us. We had to pick through the building codes and envision the distances and slope measurements to bring waste water to the perimeter of the house. Our new septic tank is about twenty feet north-east of the house and the waste pipe will exit the house at the nearest point to it, so things are relatively short distanced. Studying the problem took about two hours before we could come up with a parts list. We went out to buy the stuff today for installation beginning tomorrow.

Our current plan is to finish the plumbing projects and have the inspections done by next Friday. Following approvals we will begin the next, slightly less laborious,  process of putting the flooring boards down. This will be done in three parts.

The first is to put in the underfloor insulation. We have found a way to chisel the cost of insulating down by nearly one half and figured a way to install it in about half the time, so our economical goals are in line with this part of the build. The insulation will be put in as each course of floor boards goes down. This is mostly because rain comes and goes and we certainly don't need watery insulation under the house. We are hoping for dry weather, but too often our hopes are dashed. We will cover the entire floor with sheet plastic if the rains show up and pull the plastic back between rainy times.

The second part of the flooring project will be putting the sub-floor cover down on the frame and securing it with glue and nails. There are a lot of nails going into this portion of the build. For this we will  use the pneumatic nailer we bought to build the tiny home cabin a few years ago. I found a way to chisel the price of the floor boards down a bit, but these things are fairly stable for price and competition hasn't allowed for much savings. It will take forty-seven four by eight foot boards to do the job, and there will be a bit of waste wood following installation. Hopefully we will find uses for the scrap in the attic flooring later on.

Once these two parts are finished the wall building project commences. This will be the fun part. The wood gets lighter, the nailing isn't low down or on the wet ground. The walls are designed to go together on the flat area of the floor, then be raised in small bites, there to be nailed together. The house is small and there are few interior walls to build, so this part of the project will give us a great deal of satisfaction as the house takes its final shape. The steps following the walls going up will take a bit longer to describe than I have here.

There hasn't been much else happening this week. Farming isn't ready to commence until mid-March. But the chickens are producing and our farming plans are going along despite nothing getting done in this area. But the house must be our priority. Earning a living really can't happen until the house is built and the new kennel put together and our planned schedule is pretty far behind.

The week ahead looks pretty fair and dry. Hope springs eternal.

February 9, 2020 Drying out

If you have been keeping up with the story of the Farm, you already know that it has been a bit wet here this Winter. The weather report said seven inches in January and I believe they're just a bit low. Last week seemed dryer than any week in recent memory The weather was better, but only just a bit better. There were only three days where we got rained out of work, but there was so much mud. . . .

We bought a unit of crushed rock to fix the damage done to the driveway by digging trenches and allowing ninety ton cement trucks in when it was really wet.  The driveway is cleaned up once more and we even got a small foot path back to the house. But the mud was still making things horrible to walk on, so I went down to McMinnville on Monday to get a load of straw to put  everywhere the mud was still a problem.

Straw is hard to find this late in the Winter because there is so much building going on in the City and everyone has the same mud abatement problems. The farm I get it from is west of McMinnville. This sounds like a long distance drive, but really it is only a forty-five minutes away. The bales are slightly less expensive there, but most importantly he has some bales to sell. We got fifteen bales and the mud we covered took ten. Just as things got cleaned up enough to work the rains slacked off and things started to dry out.

We had two minor County inspections on Monday, plumbing and electrical things which we passed easily, so we began "rolling joists" on Tuesday. (I don't know they they call it "rolling", but what they mean is putting the joists together to make a floor frame onto which we can build the walls.) This is heavy work, but with straw covering the mud made the work a bit easier. We're still waiting for a special order girder beam for half the floor to rest upon. But we got about half of the floor frame nailed together and the beam should show up next Monday.We'll make quick work of the remaining frame once it arrives. Then on to some easier next steps.

First up will be the plumbing that goes under the house. All the water and waste pipes have to be in and checked before we can lay down floor boards. Most of this work  should be pretty easy to imagine. Our only  big changes are in the hot water supply.

We're putting in a tank-less propane water heater as the main supplier of hot water and this will allow us a limitless supply. To augment the tank-less heater, we'll put in a small water heater in the linen closet of the bathroom. The distance from the tank-less heater to the bathroom is more than forty feet and the little tank in the bathroom will provide immediate hot water while being refilled with pre-heated water from the main heater. The little holding tank will only need to maintain the temperature so it will be cheap to run. These two water heaters together ought to lower heating costs by half while giving us immediate and unlimited hot water, achieving the 85% rule. (85% of all desire for 50% of the resources.)

We have re-considered  the pipes we're going to put in, deciding to go with PEX plastic pipe. The system will cost half as much as we have budgeted for copper and go in much more easily than all of the copper pipe and welding we were committed to using. Nearly all of the pipe will run through holes bored in the joists and be surrounded by six inches of insulation everywhere. The septic pipe is just a big expensive black thing where no economizing can be found. But ours is a very small house with a simple waste water system.

In other areas: The gardens are beginning to grow things, some of them good. Low weeds are everywhere, but these are the sort which burn off easily using our field burner. I can cover about five hundred square feet of burning at a time so there's a lot to do. But the growth also includes the bulbs Ann put in last fall which are really doing well.

Ann re-assigned last years corn rows to bulbs just to have a place large enough to put it all. We left the Crocus (flowering right now) where it was but the hundreds of Tulips and Daffodils we had propagated last year got planted and we bought three hundred more of three types to kick start the numbers. So right now there's about seven hundred bulbs in six rows. Many of these are already budding out. By next year we should have about twenty-three hundred bulbs and can start putting them into the Kitchen Garden where they will live year around.

There are also have Onions and Garlic over-Wintering out in the Market Garden and they are doing pretty well. Over-Wintering Onions is experimental because the wet weather can bring rot, but the Garlic is where we grew it last year and it worked pretty well. Garlic takes nine months to produce so we re-planted immediately after last year's harvest using cloves we grew ourselves. With the bulbs it is all about increasing numbers without buying more.

Other that the stuff written above, we got a bit more accomplished. Every day we scour Craig's List for deals on things we will need and found a few this week. We somehow scored eight oak barrels, four emptied of French wine, four emptied of whiskey, for free. And we picked up a good used cement mixer for $90.00, to save us about three hundred. Finally, we found a brand new kitchen sink and saved about $150.00 on it. We still need a back door, but there is still time.

With warmer and drier in the forecast, and the beam landing early next week things are looking good for building walls pretty soon. Hopefully we'll get things done before time must be devoted to the gardens mid-March.

February 1, 2020 Another Wet Week

I'm told that this is a "solar minimum" year, one where the Sun's Corona lacks Sunspots, so less energy is reaching us. I'm no scientist. But the source of this information contends that the cooler season with extra rain is the result. There is nothing to be done, the rain falls. Gravity is still the law.

So this past week was another rained out game. We had about three short periods of time suitable for work outdoors. We were able to get the trenching under the Farmhouse, and a drainage sump put in as well. The conduit for electricity and the first water pipe is also put in, but little else was done this week worthy of noting here.

The forecast for next week is for a clearing trend. We have an inspection scheduled for Monday. Following this we may be able to put the sub-floor framing in and this will allow a large part of the house plumbing to by piped in before the next inspection. These two things are not very weather dependent, but the ground where we will need to work gets very slippery when wet. A bit of dry weather is what we need to get things moving.