Work continues

It feels like a milestone, or a really great Christmas present.  Yesterday the pole barn went live, with electricity that is.  After nearly two weeks of intermittent digging the trench was completed, the wire run through conduit, the conduit set in the trench. 

The trench is two feet deep.  The spring rain had soaked the clay enough to make shoveling not total misery, except for the perimeter drain.  The perimeter drain is a vein of large stones, about 2 inches, that is about a foot below the surface and goes to god knows how deep.  The trench crossed the drain for about 10 feet.  Shoveling through the stones was pure hell, and stones kept falling in from the side of the trench to make things worse.  And there were tree roots that had to be axed.

Yesterday I hooked up the wire to the load panel in the house and the panel in the pole barn.  Now there are lights and electricity in the barn.  It sure is nice to be able to plug in a tool or compressor without running a heavy 100 ft extension cord from the house to the barn.  Lights that work!

The trench still has to be filled back in and I'm not in a real big hurry to do that.  At least it's a lot easier than digging it out.

I built a little platform so the water pump can set level on the banks of the pond.  It's now set up so the pump can be hooked up quickly via a 50 ft hose to the hose reel, which holds 130 feet of hose.  Combined with the 20 feet of PEX tubing from pond to pump there's 200 feet of hose. That's enough hose to get water to any vegetable or flower bed on the property.  I gave the beds a good soaking a few days ago as there hadn't been any rain in a week.  I like to first water the vegetable beds, then the flower beds, then return to the vegetable beds for another soaking. 

 

Today there was a downpour but it's only a matter of time before the summer draughts begin.  I'm ready.

 

 

Too many projects

If  you have acreage in the country, even just a few acres, there's always plenty to do, unless one chooses to let entropy take its course.   With six acres in southern Indiana that hold a pond, woods and pasture the property has the potential to be productive.  The woodlot gives me firewood and the pasture could carry some grazing animals if it had a fence around it.

Then there's the pond.  Farm ponds have a lot of positives.  They provide wildlife habitat, recharge aquifers by holding water back that slowly seeps into the ground, and in aggregate help manage watersheds by reducing flow into rivers, in other words flood control.  This pond also has a healthy population of fish that I harvest regularly.  Ponds also require maintenance, especially on the levee, something I did not understand and mostly neglected for years until this spring, when a heavy rain made some serious gashes on the back side of the levee.

I wrote about the levee repair a while back.  After cutting down the multiflora rose that had taken over and shaded out any ground cover, spreading two truckloads of dirt, seeding and strawing, the levee looked like this, with some pipes laid over the seedling mats to hole them down:

Since then the grass (and blackberries) have grown thickly in the new soil and established a root system that should hold things in place:

There are still some more repairs to make on the levee, but they are not nearly as critical and can wait until I have the time.  That's a good thing because there's another project that should have been completed by now, if not for the levee repair - putting wiring in the pole barn.  I was hoping to build a shed addition at one end of the pole barn this year for a workshop, but first the barn needs electricity.
 
This is a very basic setup with outlets for fluorescent fixtures overhead, an outside light over the door and some outlets within reach.   Putting the wires in conduit takes a lot of time, but I have a lot of time and enjoy the work.

That leaves the hard part, digging a two foot deep trench 75 feet from the house to the barn.  As much as I enjoyed the wiring I dislike the digging.  It's brutally hard work.  I got started a few days ago at the side of the barn:

So far I've dug about half the length of the green line on the grass.  The tulip poplar was killed by the tulip scale infestation last year but it's roots remained to torture me. 

Then there's the nearly finished mobile rabbit pen that I stopped working on to repair the levee.  Someday it will have rabbits but I don't know when.  I've mostly given up on any timetables.

Solar tube

One end of the kitchen is always in the dark.  The builder should have put a second window  into the kitchen wall, but then the builder should have designed the kitchen altogether differently, so there’s no point to start griping.  I bought a Velux 10” solar tube about a month ago when it was on sale at the big box lumberyard.  Saturday was cool and cloudy -  the perfect day to install the tube.

A solar tube is simply a tube with a silvered coating inside and a weatherproof clear cap on top that transmits and reflects light into a room.  Well there’s a little more to it than that – elbows, flashing, ceiling diffuser – but you get the idea.

Let me say that this is not the kind of project an amateur should attempt.  If you don’t feel comfortable cutting a hole in your roof and removing shingles you probably shouldn’t try a project like this.  The job went smoothly but took most of the day.  There was an added level of difficulty since the tube went about three feet from the outside wall, making it impossible to access from the attic due to the low pitch of the roof.  So everything had to line up perfectly. 

The dome.

Inside, no lights on.

Does it light up the space?  Yes, it makes big difference.  It’s like having a light on throughout the day.  Right now the dome is shaded most of the day but it still lets a lot of light in.  The ceiling diffuser has two layers of clear plastic with a dead air space between.  That should provide ample insulation.     

2011 - Was it productive?

Until a month ago when I started teaching part-time I had a lot of time available to complete projects in the house and the yard.  It seemed a good time to assess what was completed in 2011 and what I still want to do in order to get the property in the shape I want. 

Thursday saw fantastic weather, clear, sunny and mid-70’s, the first nice day in nearly two weeks.   I’ve been looking for ways to expand the growing space, now about 250 square feet in beds.  The tree shadows don’t allow for any more beds to the south of the existing beds, but the bed in front could be expanded on one side.  The triangular shape fits into the contours and also looks nice.  It should be a good spot to grow some herbs.  I started this project last weekend, was stopped by a rain shower, and finished it on Thursday. 

At the beginning of 2011 I started remodeling the master bath.  That project dragged on for several months.  I replaced the vanity and toilet, installed ceramic tile on the tub surround and new vinyl tile on the floor, put new casing around the doors, installed a ceramic tile baseboard and repainted the room.  It was a long job and ceramic tile can be very time-consuming for a novice but the finished results make it all worth it. 

In March the raised beds looked like this.  The cherry tree that I felled the previous autumn did not quite drop where I wanted it to fall.  Before I could cut it into logs the snows came and left me with this spring project.  At this time I’m splitting the logs for firewood.  The damage to the beds was not as bad as it looks here.

Another spring project were the shade beds behind the back deck.  The landscape timbers that formed the beds were rotting away.  The ground under the beds has a lot of slope, and the beds not only look nice but prevent erosion by terracing the slope.  When the old timbers were removed the soil actually held in place until I put in the pressure treated 4x4’s.   I tried to avoid walking in the beds when doing work, and finished this before the hostas came up.

Putting some flower beds around the front porch was another spring priority.  I used retainer blocks to form two semicircular beds around the front porch.  A foundation bed was built along the front of the house with edging blocks.  A yard of compost and a yard of soil/compost mix were dug it into the clay.  The beds were planted mainly with hostas and lillies.  The rhododendron is a little out of its comfort zone but has survived several hard winters in its south-facing location.

The ongoing project in the house has been the repainting of the interior doors and jambs and refinishing the wood trim throughout the house.  I removed the doors to the pole barn and painted them on sawhorses.  All of the door and window casing and the baseboard is varnished cedar which was only half-finished by the builder (shocking isn’t it?).  The woodwork was never sanded to smoothness and the original varnish had already soaked into the wood. 

 I removed the baseboards and the top and bottom pieces of the window trim, then sanded and revarnished them (two coats) in the pole barn.  Since there was some extra wood available I was able to cull out the wood that was off-color and replace it with better wood.  While the baseboard was off I repainted the walls in the walk-in closet, second bedroom and sunroom.  So far I’ve used six quarts of varnish.  

The sunroom was the most work of any room.  It has more windows than all the other rooms combined and more wood casing.  Here’s a picture of the almost finished sunroom with the top pieces over the windows being put back on.  That’s a glass of red wine next to the miter saw – I was finished for the day and thought a reward was in order. 

The chicken tractor and mobile henhouse projects were in earlier posts.  Here’s a basic workbench I built in one of the minibarns.  It’s hard to get work done without a decent workbench.

Can’t forget storage.  A double row of shelves across the back side of the polebarn provides a lot more storage space.

Now that I’m working part time I won’t be able to get as much done.  The one project I still hope to complete this year is the installation of a light tube in the kitchen.  Part of the kitchen never gets enough natural light and the suntube looks like a good way to light up a dark area.  Next week is supposed to have nice weather, maybe a good time to cut a hole in the roof. . .