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.
No comments:
Post a Comment