Step Seven - well, Six-and-a-half...

The next two evenings were spent raising the last trusses, blocking, putting in the runners that tie them all together, making plumb, and bracing off. There was cursing... Somehow I think I wronged a Douglas Fir in another life and it's getting back at me in this one... Sometimes I have to beat those nails like a rented mule to get them to go anywhere...




Last night I sheathed the gable trusses and put up the lookouts. I have a 4 day weekend coming up - hopes are that I'll have it edged, decked, and papered by the 6th - then it can start drying out after all the rain we've been having - and then rain while I'm trying to shingle it off... Ever run a chalkline in the rain? sigh...

There was a visitor to the chicken tractor last night as I was sheathing the gable rafters - lots of flapping and a couple of squawks until they figured out they needed to be quiet - a raptor of some kind had landed and was peeking down at the chickens while keeping an eye on me...

I barely got a phonecam picture before it took off. Initially, I thought it was a juvenile Peregrine, but now I'm not so sure. The coloring is more like a Northern Harrier, though the size is right for either... If my thumb wasn't so big or the button not so small, I might have quickly gotten another picture... Maybe I'll stake out a couple of Beanie Babies in the yard and see if it comes back and takes the bait...

Nature does nothing uselessly.
~Aristotle

Step Six - Try not to run out of steam...

So I left you hanging with only 4 of the walls up - 2 ends and 2 half sides...

We finished the walls, filled in the corners, did the 'plumb-and-line' and bracing, got the trusses delivered, and got about 4 hours in on the roof. I hope to have most of the rest of the trusses raised over the next 2 or 3 evenings then have the whole thing sheathed and nailed off over the next week or so. I may not be 'Dry by July', but I'll be close. Here's the run-up to today:

Finished the walls...

The corners will be closed off last:

Door trimmer detail:

Corner top plate detail:

Window trimmers/cripples detail:

Anchor / corner detail:

Bracing (not much needed really - it came out straight, for once)

Roof trusses as delivered - it was the same driver as the last two times...

If you ever need a roof - call Fairbanks Truss Company (907-479-4346)

It's about as worry free as you can get...

Starting to spread them out - first gable is up:

Trusses spread out for raising:

First 3 and 2nd gable:

Blocking (Detail courtesy Martin Engineering, Inc.)

Blocking from the inside:

As it stands now...


I'm picking up the Insulpex pipe over my lunch break from Keller Supply - it's the pipe that'll run underground from the boiler house to the house - all one piece, insulated...

No mill news - haven't had the time to crank it up lately.

No bike news other than I've bought the drive sprocket cassette, the disc brakes are in the mail, I have the pillow blocks for the rear axles, and I have several pounds of fasteners all conveniently arranged at the bottom of an old lasagne pan, along with a handful of wood chips and some escaped pellets for padding... I'll have to get pictures of the progress soon...

No chicken news... Though I'm thinking of side blogs for each of them to record their chronicles... Barnia? I can imagine it would be pretty boring... "Pecked at the shiny thing, ate some crumbly stuff, had a drink. Considered the consequences of my actions concerning my particular place in the universe and my personal role in it all - the 'what would happen if I weren't here?' question. And did I come first or was it the egg? Oh, look - a shiny thing!"

Never mind...

~Gustatus Similis Pullus~

Step Five - More waiting - building - inspections...

So what do you do when you're waiting that first week before building anything on your new concrete? Walk barefoot on the new coolness, of course! Use all 4 if you got 'em - Styopa did... I only got off the pad long enough to take the picture :)



OK - we had the pour done on the 7th - then waited a week before building. In the meantime, I arranged for the bulk of the building material to be delivered on the 14th - hopefully earlier in the day, but the 14th sometime... The truck pulled up about 3, dropped (literally) the load in the driveway, and left - Alexander and I started moving piles... About 4 we discovered that there were 8 single items missing - called the friendly folks at Northland Wood Products, Inc. (452-4000) - in 45 minutes it was delivered and stacked... Whew! Try that with Homie D's or Lowelys... I guess I'll be going back there for quite a few other things in the next couple of weeks...

Sunday I spent building the main walls (north/south end of the main section, and the east/west walls of the studio side. We shuffled some things here and there and stopped here:



I stopped in to Lowe's that evening to see if the shingles had arrived. (only place around that deals in Owens-Corning...) I knew they had because I checked my order status online. But I wanted to see if they knew that the order had arrived. Nope. I got there with my receipt, asked if they could locate my order - it took 30 minutes to determine that: yes, they were ordered - yes, they were delivered - they came off the truck the day before and that they were ready to pick up. Interesting that they hadn't called me to tell me they were in... Oh, well... Three trips later (with the handy mini-trailer) I had a stack of shingle bundles at the side of my driveway. A good day's work...

A day deserving of one of the best lagers ever!

(A shout out to the members of the former 32d Armored Regiment, 2d Bn, A Co., and the 69th Armor, 2d Bn!)
AND - not only was it Father's Day, but I was building stuff! :)

A bit later the building inspectors came to check out the framing:

One of them had harsh comments...

Hmm...

See you next time~

Step Four - Done waiting - and off to a good start...

If you want fantastic concrete work and great service - call these guys:

McConnell's Concrete Finishing and HC Redi-Mix. They were right there - early! They were sure, quick, efficient, and friendly. And unlike some people that I won't mention, they didn't crush all my plants or back over anything. They didn't back into my trees and rip the bark. They didn't drive into the forms and cause a delay while they were reset. They didn't jerk me around on price. And they didn't mind if I dipped in the donut box ;)



So now I've got a coat of sealant on the concrete, waiting for Saturday and a large pile of lumber so I can begin framing... I'm hoping to have walls up by Sunday suppertime... A roof up in 2 weeks... Dry by July... I wish I had more than evenings and weekends, sometimes...



Meet The Peepers

Back row, left to right:
Dot and Dash (The Morse Sisters) and Cogburn (Reuben)
Front row:
Saffron and Cinnamon (the Hippy Chicks)

I know you're not supposed to name your food, but the hopes are that these few will be making eggs all winter and not make the trip to the freezer and 'The Big Sleep'... Maybe a new brood in the spring, even. (Seed chickens...) They'll have their own room on the side of the boiler house, a window, and a straw box each. Maybe name plates or personalized quilts, I dunno... I hope they don't want the room painted 'Eggshell'...

Meet The Pellets

Yep - getting there... 3 kilos last night before I gummed up the mix again... In the meantime I'm building a sifter/mixer and collecting parts for a three-pass chip dryer. I'll have pics of that as it gets working.

Long day - gonna go clean my framing hammer and dust out my nail bags before bed... I need to sharpen a couple of pencils, too... (yawn) Not enough hours in the day, anymore...

~Remember to live while you live~

Step Three - Get really busy and forget your blog...

Tomorrow it will be a month since the last time I was here - in the interest of appearing not lame I should post something, right? That and I'll be really busy again tomorrow...

We've been digging, digging, digging... Scraping, picking, chipping, chopping, hacking, and scooping our way down and back up again in order to be able to make the floor of the boiler house. The forms are all set and the concrete comes tomorrow...

There are Arxx brand insulated concrete forms (ICF) around the perimeter, one side cut down to allow the floor slab to be connected to the footing strip. #4 rebar is placed in the convenient clips built in to the forms, then wired together and finally staked to the ground and banked up with gravel to keep it all in place. Foam sheets are placed within the cut down area to insulate and isolate the slab from the ground. 6x6 welded wire mesh is placed over the foam and linked together to reinforce the slab (it will be pulled up into the center of the slab as the concrete is poured, hopefully it will stay where it is put...) Anchor bolts will be placed around the perimeter, peeking out the top of the slab, ready to hold down the walls that will start to go together about a week from tomorrow... More news on the boiler house later - but here are some pictures...

The site:

The stack of foam form blocks:

Forms ready for concrete:

Detail of forms:

Remember those chickens we raised on hand-fed bugs and worms and rainwater and grass and dustbaths and frisbee matches?

Freezer.

And man are they tasty :) Whupped up a meal the other night - involved honey, mint, lemon, and some other magic something. I had half this bird to myself... mmm-MM!

The pellet mill finally made it to the driveway. Actually I had to go pick it up with the trailer since the trucking company conveniently forgot that they were going to drop it off... Probably a good thing... The mill was defunct when I opened the crate. It had not been secured to the crate so it had flopped around a bit. The bolts that had previously held it assembled (disassembled for shipping) were in the bottom of the crate rolling about and trying to hide from me when I tried to hunt them down. The washers and nuts were loose, too, only they were inside the switch box that holds the controls, metering, and breakers for the motor. They had caused their own mayhem in the switch box and there were wires disconnected and small metal things wedged between the electrical bits. I can only imagine what I would have if I had followed the 3 page manual (the light version with no parts list or electrical diagrams) and plugged it in and hit the switch... (Probably nothing, actually...) There were paint flakes everywhere that had once held residence at the bottom of several dents in the back of the switch box and there was one unlabeled bag of the rest of the bits and one tool I would need to put the mill back together.

Sigh

Reassembled, I plugged it in and pressed the start switch. The breaker popped. Reset the breaker, checked everything, pressed the starter switch again. GRRRRRRRpop. The ammeter pegged out at 50 amps before tripping the breaker again. hmm... (emails and phone calls ensue - requested wiring diagram (I may post a picture of it later) , talks about warranty issues, who pays for testing, new motor, parts - last suggestion is that the centrifugal switch is not closing so that the start capacitor can actually do it's job...) I bent the arms of the centrifugal switch just slightly, hit the start switch and off it went...

So far I've made a mix of flour, oil, and sand to polish the bores of the plate die so the material can go through smoothly, and I've made a mix of just flour and oil (cooking oil, by the way) to oil the plate for 'storage' so that I don't have to use a punch or drill to clean out the hardened wood bits. So far the formula for perfect wood pellets (as shown by the company on the web site) eludes me, but I still have a fair amount to go through as practice...

At least I can use it as a dough mixer - maybe at Christmas I can use it to make dough pellets... ;) More pellet news as I make it...

~Use it up - wear it out - make it do - or do without~

Step Two - Wait some more...

I've been waiting a long time to be this 'green'. Actually, it's that I've been waiting a long time to have the opportunity to do something much more right than what I've been doing. I've been waiting a long time to be in and have a more sustainable frame of mind and way of life. Now I need the patience to endure the next couple of months of trials I know I'll face, new things I must learn quickly, well, and without fail.

Update to the last:

The boiler is in the driveway secured under a standard Alaskan-household-issue blue tarp (held in place with a scrap of rope left over from the treehouse project...), 1,316 pounds of cast iron, boiler plate, ceramic, and stainless steel waiting for the boiler house to be built... (The 1,316 pounds also included two quarts of Maple Syrup from New Hampshire - home to Tarm USA (clicking noise with tongue, points finger like gun, winks suggestively)) Last year this time we had budding trees, warm nights, and the moose were pelletizing the front yard... And while the spot is cleared for the boiler house, the ground is still frozen hard just 3 inches below the surface - just barely below the thin layer of humus that those evil dandelions seem to thrive in.

The pellet mill hit the credit card this morning - hard enough to wear off a couple of digits a little right of center. The funds are poised in my bank account waiting for the points system to catch up so I can pay it off in one go - gotta have that 'free gift', right? The pellet mill hitting the card means the truck is underway - they say 11 days from them to me, provided they get the boat schedule just right and hand it off at the dock in Tacoma... Can't wait - I've been collecting chips off the lathe and from the planer all winter - I'm thinking they need a little compressing before I drown in them...

The chickens were hand fed freshly caught mosquitoes today - what a life...

My T's are free until fall - just need to get the R's back now and there will be much progress and rejoicing...

Off to dig a little, scrape, pickpickpickpickpickpickpickpick..........

Step One - refinance your house...

OK, so in the recent refinancing of the house I downloaded some money to be able to:

Big Stuff:
1 - Add a boiler house/pellet house/studio out front.

2 - Add a pellet-fired boiler to the boiler house.

3 - Add a pellet mill to the boiler house to make pellets to fuel the boiler to heat the house, shop, and the boiler house... (We'll talk barn later... And chicken ranch...)

Immediately this will cut my heating bill in half (or more), dollar-wise, since I won't be using oil, though it will increase the work I must do in order to heat everything as wood takes some processing from tree to pellet (1). Yup, I won't be buying heating fuel 'drilled out the ground' any more, except in small quantities, and then only as a 'fallback' in case we run out of trees soon. The whole system should pay for itself in 6 years or less (at current rate of inflation for fuel, maybe only 4 years, if the Fed keeps messing about maybe only 2 years...) and, if anyone wonders, will reduce the ‘carbon footprint’ of my household to almost zip... According to the literature, during a burn the pellets produce as much smoke as that from a cigarette. I have yet to figure out how they got the test pellets to smoke a Marlboro... I’ll get back to you on that... With all the hot water I hope to have, there may be winter hot-tubbing...

Smaller Stuff:

4 - Put in some yard box raised bed garden thingies of dirt and hopefully raise some veggie things more successfully than I did my old rock garden. (The rocks kept dying...) Yeah, I know, that didn't cost much in the big picture, but it was not money I would have spent normally... Let’s see if the cukes survive next to the carrots and icicle radishes next to the spuds...

5 - Raise chickens. (OK, so far that part has only cost me about $82.50, but then there's only a dozen...) I could go on all day about how cool/cute/amazing/smelly/etc. they are, but I won't. “Hangin’ with my peeps” has new meaning for me...

6 - Build some alternative transportation/power generation type machines. More accurately I could now buy the tools and materials to make them. First up is a HPV quad 'bike', but I'm not against some electronical-recharging um, contrivance. Yes, I'll still be buying gasoline for a while - until I build my 1952 gasification-fired 'Coupe-de-Still' with a flathead V8. I figure I could park a wood cracking plant in the trunk and still carry half a cord of 'fuel' alongside the groceries. I can hear me saying it now, "Went to Chitina last weekend - cost all of three fenceposts and half an outhouse I found on the highway..." I'll have to kiss the old auto-start goodbye though – unless I can get someone to fill the block hopper, start the draw fan, light off the cooker, wait for the hot smoke, and then start the engine to let it warm up...

The boiler house is half-ordered - waiting for a concrete slab...
The boiler is on a boat just now, motoring it's way northward...
The mill is on a truck someplace in Illinois, waiting...
The boxes are waiting for dirt to come next weekend...
The chickens are doing what chickens do and watching out of both sides of their heads at the same time...
The quad bike is in process - I may have most of the frame done up in the next 2 weeks - this IS the last week of classes and I'll have my T's and R's evenings free next week...

I hope to be updating this blog during the course of construction - links, pictures, thoughts, problems, solutions, recipes, and pictures of chickens in various stages of life...

Ya'll be Green now, y'heah?

Toodles~




(1) Actually I’ll be pelletizing anything I can get my hands on – trees, willows, leaves, garden leftovers, paper, old cotton fluff – anything that came from a plant, really... Laurels, fig leaves, olive branches...