The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 57-63)
Day 57. (TFC Fabricating Some Flashing From Scrap Metal, Cutting Metal With A Circular Saw, Creating A Drip Edge, Installing Rusty Old Roofing Metal & Finishing The Shelter Roof)
I was once again awake very early this morning and ready to get to working on stuff but alas it was once again a rainy morning. At least it was not all that chilly so as soon as the rain stopped and the sun peeked out I got outside and got busy.
I have recently been trying to figure out what to use as flashing and/or drip edge for the shelter roof and although I had gathered up a decent sized pile of aluminum pieces I was quite concerned about making it look good (as flashing) and whether creating a drip edge with it would be more trouble than it was worth. I really lucked up because there was just enough pieces that already had a bend at the end (to act as a drip edge) that I could at least do the uphill and downhill sides of the roof with it and the sides with a piece that lacked the bend.
To create enough flashing material of the same kind I had to cut several sixteen inch by three foot pieces in half and although I did the first cut with a pair of metal snips (sheers) I rapidly realized that doing all sixteen pieces that way would take entirely too damn long so I got an old blade for a circular saw and installed it backwards on the saw and set to work cutting all the remaining fifteen pieces in two cuts which was a heck of a lot faster than the snips.
Installing the flashing went rather smoothly but lacking a true sub-fascia on the sides of the roof made things a bit tricky. I did install the flashing in such a way on the sides that I can easily add some sub-fascia (and fascia) later when I actually have the material to do so.
A lot of the roofing metal (ok all of it) has holes in it or places that have cracked or it is bent or all three so piecing together a roof with it all was a bit challenging. I wound up installing a few pieces that were found near the creek here and they were in much better shape than any of the material that I brought with me from the last place. I also lacked proper fasteners for screwing off the roofing metal but between some nails and a hodgepodge of various screws I got it anchored down well enough to withstand just about anything the weather in this mountainous area might throw at it.
Anyway fifty-seven days in and I have a cozy shelter with a big roof over it that can handle a snow load so I guess that I have done slightly better than the ninety day timeline that I originally set for myself to be at the point with it all that I currently am. For working with a bunch of scrap material and very limited fasteners everything has come out rather well as far as the 'solidity' and functionality factors go.
I will of course keep working towards finishing the shelter out but for the moment the 'big push' to be ready for winter is over so maybe now I can start taking naps again and even give myself a break now and then. All I can say is that it feels damn good to be all cozy and warm in my little shelter on this chilly night.
Well I am going to wrap this up and call it a super productive day! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a spectacular day/night.
Day 58. (Getting A New Camera In The Mail And Being Totally Disappointed By It, Solving My WiFi Connectivity Problem, De-Cluttering The Shelter Site, Cutting A Big Log With A Tiny Chainsaw & Finally Getting More Of The Old Camp Tidied Up)
Per usual I woke up early this morning and although I was feeling a bit groggy I made another 'Say It In Pictures' post on Steemit which was made incredibly easy because the eSteem app (that I have just recently begun using) makes uploading multiple images really simple because I can just select them all and press the magical upload button.
On a different note I am really loving my recent 'life hack' of brewing my espresso on my propane heater that I have mounted on an interior wall of the shelter. It was a rather accidental hack because it was cold one morning and I did not want to change the only propane tank that I have with fuel in it to the camp stove but now I rather enjoy brewing the coffee that way because I can not only do it indoors but the coffee actually tastes better because the boiling process is rather slow and hence the espresso tastes 'richer.'
First thing this morning the new cameras arrived that I have been waiting almost six weeks for and although I was initially super excited to get them I eventually grew very dissatisfied/disappointed after making some videos and taking some pictures with one of them. I got two identical cameras because they were incredibly cheap and I wanted a backup one so that I would not have to recharge it throughout the day and also in case one broke. The camera itself is basically a knock-off GoPro (it even has a waterproof case as well as hardware to mount it to a number of items like helmets, tripods etcetera) but the quality of the images is horrible and the videos are just as bad and my phone takes better pictures than it does! I am going to test the camera again with better lighting but I do not have high hopes that the quality will be much better.
Not long after I realized what a junk purchase the cameras were my previously owned WiFi router got delivered and I was sort of skeptical about it (because of the failure with the cameras) but it was in excellent condition and worked flawlessly for my needs with only some minor configuring. I wound up putting my WiFi extender in one of the outbuildings here (previously it was in the solar shack to make it reach the shelter) and I then installed the new router inside the shelter itself because it has a 'WiFi as Wan' feature which basically means that it can act as a WiFi extender. The way things are setup is the main WiFi router is at the homestead proper and I extend it with the small WiFi extender in the outbuilding and then extend that signal with the new router. It is a bit of piggy backing but so far it has been working wonderfully and I think that I have finally solved my internet connectivity problems. If anyone is interested in what model router solved the problem it is a CradlePoint MBR95.
For several weeks now there has been a thirteen foot section of pine log beside the shelter area and I have been using it as a table and as a place to lean my garden tools but today I finally decided to section it in half and get it out of the way. The log itself was about sixteen to eighteen inches wide and my little electric chainsaw only has a fourteen inch bar but after lots of re-positioning the saw and rolling the log over I was able to cut it in half. I then rolled the sections downhill where I am thinking to either create a compost pile (with the logs situated as a raised bed) or perhaps use them as a base for building a temporary outhouse. I am still using a small tent as an outhouse but that won't work once it starts snowing so I might do the outhouse project with them instead of the compost pile.
Once the sectioned logs were out of the way I set about beautifying that part of the shelter area's yard by cutting off more of those sapling stumps (created before my arrival) and picking up all the debris in the area like sticks and rocks so that I can get it raked and add some grass seed to it before the weather gets super cold.
The next big things that I did today was to finally get the big camping tent dismantled and hung up to dry as well as cleaning up some odds and ends stuff that was still in the tent like the blocks of wood that I initially leveled the bed with as well as the remaining bale of straw which I put in the outhouse tent for now because I just couldn't figure out where else to store it. While cleaning up the old camp I also started cleaning up the shelter site as well because it has been a full blown construction site the last several weeks and although it was mostly organized it still bothered me that it looked a bit 'trashy' but no more than any construction site looks when there is a lot of frenzied activity at it.
Anyway things are progressing here and I am quite satisfied with how well setup I am thus far and am looking forward to seeing how it all turns out. Well that is about it for now and I hope that everyone is doing very well and has a nice day/night.
Day 59. (TFC Visiting Camp Grits, Installing The Last Of The Roofing Metal On The Shelter's Exterior & Installing Some Much Needed Shelving In The Shelter)
Today has been a really long day and I am a bit tired (and slow witted) for phone typing but if I put it off much longer I will assuredly doze off before I can get this written, edited and posted.
I once again woke up long before the sun and immediately started working on another one of those Say It In Pictures posts on Steemit which was entirely too time consuming because the satellite internet here was once again being dodgy. It goes to figure that now that I sorted the WiFi out that I would start noticing connectivity problems with the actual internet connection itself. Hopefully over the coming months the new broadband will get installed to this area and my data will no longer have to travel to space and back for me to do stuff on the internet.
Early in the day me and some other folks went to a place nearby called Camp Grits which turns out is a rather well known camping/Airbnb destination that to say the least was pretty neat but to me it looked a lot like a beautiful rustic homestead nestled in the mountains here on a really nice piece of flat land with good sun and plenty of water! It was actually a very charming experience visiting there but mostly I was focused on looking at the water scenario and investigating the potential of setting up a secondary DC powered well pump so that the water is accessible when the grid power goes down. The way the well is setup there would make doing such a backup pump system incredibly simple and if it was solar powered the well house itself has a perfectly aimed and angled roof for installing solar panels on it so that is rather convenient.
While I was at Camp Grits I also wound up doing some troubleshooting and repairing of a super simple small solar power setup (in one of the rental campers) that only runs two seven watt LED lights and while doing it I got to share a good bit of the stuff that I have learned about solar power over the last few years. It is pretty crazy that I learned that stuff out of necessity and rather amazing just how much of it my memory has actually retained on the subject!
Once I got back to Fantastica I immediately got to work installing the remaining pieces of green roofing metal on the exterior walls of the shelter. Seeing the logos on the house wrap everyday (and in all the photos of the shelter) has been really getting on my nerves and today I finally reached my breaking point with seeing them and decided that no matter what it took I was going to cover them all up today!
The last few pieces of green roofing metal that I had were in pretty bad shape between the dents, the bends and the assorted holes in them but with lots of hammering and lots of work with some pliers I eventually got each piece straightened out enough that I could actually install it. It came out looking pretty good even though I used a wide variety of fasteners to secure it and the last tiny section to the left of the door I had to piece together with the remnants of what was left of the metal from when I cut a piece of it out of a full panel to accommodate the window.
Late in the day I finally got to the point where I couldn't tolerate not having any good storage in the shelter so I took some time to shuffle a bunch of stuff out of the way and install some more shelving which worked out really well because I finally have some room on my writing desk and overall the place no longer feels like a cluster fuck of too much stuff in too small of a space.
Anyway I am going to wrap this up and get some much needed rest. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 60. (TFC Making The Best Of A Chilly And Rainy Day, Doing Some Data Recovery, Setting Up An Android Web Server & Staying Warm In The Shelter With The Dogs)
I woke up rather late this morning to find that it was a rainy and chilly outside so I just stayed inside and did some computer work that mainly centered around doing some (or at least attempting to do some) data recovery on one of my fellow homesteader's crashed hard drives. Last night I had retrieved a bunch of data from a different hard drive but today's endeavors were not productive at all in that regard.
At some point late in the day I gave up on the data recovery (for the time being at least) and began working on another Say It In Pictures post on Steemit while simultaneously setting up a rather simple local web server that runs on my old Android tablet. The tablet has been rather useless because the touchscreen does not work and although I can use a wireless keyboard with it and a wired USB mouse the battery is weak and I can't charge the tablet and use the mouse simultaneously. Anyway I have been daydreaming about having a small web server that I can power via solar and I think that the old tablet will work well for that. Currently I only have the web server setup to work on the local wireless network but in time I might set it up to have it's own web address that is accessible from the actual internet. For now I am simply hoping to make it easier for me to share files with my local homesteaders because the internet here is slow and sharing stuff via thumb drives and bluetooth is often slow and/or cumbersome.
How the Android based web server idea first came to me was when I was reading about the solar powered server that runs Low Tech Magazine's website: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ which got me to thinking (about a year ago) how I could do something similar utilizing just the gear that I currently had. Honestly I gave up on the project because I was not making enough electricity at the time to spare any on such an experiment. It is totally just a small side project but I am excited to see how it comes out and what (if anything) it evolves into.
Anyway mostly today I just stayed out of the cold rain and hung out with the dogs in the cozy shelter. Throughout the day I kept an eye on the metal roof during the rain and amazingly it did not seem to be leaking anywhere even though the roofing metal has numerous holes in it. I guess that the roof pitch is enough that the water rolls off the roof before it can make it's way into the holes. That is at least my best guess but hey I am just glad that I can walk out the door and not get wet while standing under the roof's overhang.
Well that is about it for now and I am going to wrap this up and call it a day. Hopefully the weather clears up tomorrow and I can get back to working on stuff around here. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 61. (TFC Working On The Woodshed, Digging Holes, Making Black Locust Stakes, De-Barking Hemlock & Having A Really Productive Day)
I woke up rather early this morning and after tediously uploading a bunch of high resolution images to Steemit (and making yet another Say It In Pictures post) I got busy outside working on stuff.
At first I did not really know what I was going to work on because it was cloudy and looking like it was going to rain and I did not want to pull out a bunch of tools just to have to put them away again.
Well that was as far as I got typing this before falling asleep last night so now that I am awake again I will do my best to finish it off while things are more or less fresh in my mind.
Not having much good dry storage for building materials and firewood has been really getting on my nerves lately especially since we have been getting a good bit of rain here. The frustrating part is that if I just had more good fasteners I could probably put together a small pole barn or shed without too much difficulty.
Another thing that has been bothering me is that the hemlock posts and header system that I built just keeps getting rained on and that particular project (for the woodshed) has been really dragging out which makes sense because I have been so focused on the shelter itself.
Anyway I had a bit of an epiphany while looking around at the various stuff that I have and decided to perhaps try using those wrought iron rectangles (the ones with the hearts) as part of the framework for the woodshed and to possibly stretch greenhouse plastic over skinny rafters attached to them which isn't all that bad of an idea but after lots of tinkering around with the idea I eventually abandoned it because I couldn't get the wrought iron positioned high enough that it wouldn't be something that folks (probably me) would bang their head on.
When I recently visited that Camp Grits place I saw a building that long ago was probably a greenhouse and the low side of the roof went all the way to the ground which got me thinking about doing something similar here so after lots of thought I decided to turn part of the woodshed into a greenhouse and since at least part of it's roof will have solar panels on it I can install roofing metal on that part.
So I set to work de-barking a hemlock post, did some measuring, checked that the rafter material I currently have would reach and started digging holes and putting posts in them. Fortunately I did not encounter any big rocks while digging and hit hard packed clay at twenty inches down which is two inches below the frost line here.
I wound up digging the post holes to almost exactly the size of the posts themselves and after fabricating some black locust stakes and driving them in around the posts to secure it I did my usual exhaustive tamping of the dirt around the pole to lock it in place. My goal is to eventually cut off the bottom of the post (once the building is complete) and add concrete pillars below them to act as footers and to keep the posts from rotting but currently I don't have the resources to do that and for now things will work fine the way I have it setup because the posts are large enough that it would take several years for them to completely rot away.
That is about it for now and I am going to wrap this up and get it it posted. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 62. (TFC Working On The Hybrid Woodshed/Greenhouse, Doing Lots Of Log De-barking & Finally Getting The Shelter Site Tidied Up)
Today was another one of those days that I awoke super early and immediately set to working on getting a bunch of stuff online accomplished which all and all has become a bit of a habit for me but on Sundays it is a bit more involving because it is when I do my weekly Fantastica Chronicles post on Steemit. This morning there was more to do though because last night I totally fell asleep whilst writing my nightly Patreon post so I had to immediately finish that upon waking and get it posted as well.
Although for the most part I enjoy staying on a rather consistent routine with my day to day activities it seems like lately my sleeping patterns have gotten a bit skewed because by the time I have eaten dinner with my fellow homesteaders it is long after my preferred bedtime and with all of my recent activity of pushing to get my scenario dialed in before winter I have not been taking any naps and quite frankly waking up long before the sun and still being awake late into the evening is not a routine that I want to get accustomed to. One way or another I will settle into the new place in another month but for now I am still in my ninety day adjustment period so I should not expect too much of myself just yet as far as 'established routines' go.
On a different note once I got all the stuff online done I gathered up some tools and got to working on the woodshed that has somehow morphed into also being a greenhouse. I have really been dreading de-barking the hemlock posts and headers so I decided to just focus on doing that first today. The tall hemlock posts and header was a bit wobbly (not by much but just enough to make the de-barking not quite as efficient as it could be) so the first thing that I did was add a brace (a piece of American walnut) that ran between the tall post and short post (both on the uphill side of the building) which worked really well to stiffen things up. As a side note the piece of American walnut will later become part of the doorway on the uphill side of the building. Anyway I retrieved a stouter ladder from the homestead proper and began the tedious process of de-barking the hemlock header on the tall side of the building. Since the header had an incredible amount of knots I used a two inch chisel instead of a draw knife to de-bark it which worked out really well and probably worked out to the same amount of time that it would have taken me had I used a draw knife.
After de-barking only about four feet of the header I realized that I may as well just add a poplar rafter before moving the ladder further along the header or else I would be moving the ladder around twice as much as I would really need to throughout the course of the day. So I basically settled into a routine of de-barking just enough of the header to accommodate a rafter, then de-barking a poplar rafter and then getting the rafter in position, shaping the bottom of the rafter to rest on the header of the low side of the building, then fastening the top and bottom of the rafter to the headers and finally moving the ladder again and repeating the entire process. Counting the American walnut brace/rafter I got a total of seven rafters installed and along the way I de-barked both headers and the remainder of the posts. I also got the majority of the knots removed either with the chisel or the electric chainsaw or in some cases a combination of the two.
When I started putting the rafters on the building I knew that I did not have enough of them so I did not even bother to count them so I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I am only two short of what I need to compete the roof system. I had one more rafter that I could have installed today but it is the largest one I had and honestly I just ran out of steam just thinking about having to do anymore de-barking today!
So I switched gears and decided to bring some more order to the chaos of the shelter site by tidying things up and trying to make the place look more like a homestead than a construction site which mostly involved shuffling a bunch of stuff around and getting things organized. It really was not all that much of a mess but I sure felt better having taken the last hour of daylight to do it. Having a tidy place definitely makes for better pictures!
Anyway I had to make some late night espresso so that I would not fall asleep again while writing so I better wrap this up and get it posted before the caffeine wears off and I slip off to sleep. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 63. (TFC Maintenancing A Fire Ring Area, Giving A Brief Tour Of The Homestead To A Guest, Doing Some Handyman Work, Setting Up My Outdoor On-Demand Water Heater/Shower & Inadvertently Falling Asleep Before I Could Do My Daily Writing)
It is currently early in the morning and like the title says I inadvertently fell asleep last night not long after dark before I could get any of my writing done so here I am studiously pecking out letters on my phone in the wee hours of the morning so that I can do what I should have done last night if I had not fallen asleep.
Anyway yesterday it was a chilly morning and having stuff to do early in the day outdoors I decided to maintenance a fire ring area that is near the shelter site because as previously mentioned my hybrid greenhouse/woodshed displaced the fire area that I was previously using and I have yet to find another place to put it at. At some point in the past one of my fellow homesteaders had constructed a stone fire ring and conveniently located near the main trail and I decided (for now) to use it for my morning fires which meant raking back all the leaves around it and trimming up the low hanging branches above it.
All in all it was a rather simple task and although all the burnable material was wet (from all the recent rain) eventually the fire built in it got going well. It definitely took some time to provide the sort of instantaneous high heat I wanted so I think that over the coming days I am going to find a new place for the metal enclosure burn pit that I previously constructed because the last thing I want to be doing in the morning is piddling around with a ground fire trying to get enough oxygen into it so that it will fully ignite and warm my chilly extremities!
Not long after working on the fire ring area I saw a guest that is visiting walking around the homestead proper looking at things and decided to walk with them and give them a bit of a tour of some of the things that have changed around the place since they last visited which as it turns out was only a few months before I moved here. The look on their face was rather priceless as we ambled from one area to the next and I explained what was being done or had been done to make improvements. I think that they were very (for lack of a better word) 'impressed' to see all the changes and amazed what had been accomplished in the brief time of only two months since my arrival here. I definitely take it for granted that I can accomplish a lot in a short time and here where I have actually had help from others along the way I have accomplished much more than I usually would have on my own and giving a little walkabout tour like that really snaps that productivity into focus for me.
As I have mentioned in other posts there has been a lot of maintenance work and renovation work being done at the homestead proper itself which started long before my arrival here. The fellow that has been doing the bulk of the construction work has recently started a new job and has not had time to continue the ongoing projects here so I was asked if I wanted the work or if someone else should be found to continue what all needs to be done. As much as I would prefer to keep working on my own area/projects I also am completely tapped out on finances and need a sizable chunk of revenue to continue finishing the interior (and some of the exterior) of my shelter and to be able to afford propane for the coming winter so I agreed to do the work and got a nice list of things to be done and a timeline for them to be done in. So I set about doing what was probably the easiest task first which was to install some metal under-pinning along the bottom of an addition to one of the buildings. All in all it came out pretty good and all that is left on that particular project is to create a crawl space door so that there is still an access to beneath the addition.
After all that stuff (which involved lots of digging) I decided it was high time that I setup my outdoor propane water heater/shower so that I could wash the filth off me without having to track it into the house at the homestead proper where the shower is. I was skeptical about whether the unit would still work because it had sat unused for nearly five years (or more) but thankfully I had covered all it's ports (water in, water out and propane in) with plastic before storing it which prevented any critters from making homes inside of it. I had even covered both ends of the rubber propane supply line with plastic for the same reason. I was delighted that after getting everything hooked up and the water heater mounted as well as the shower head that it worked the very first time and required no further tinkering and I was immediately able to take the most pleasant shower that I have had in years. I used an oak pallet to stand on while showering that worked rather well but right at the end of my showering I accidentally stepped through one of the openings between the slats where my slipper and foot of course got thoroughly wedged and I had to struggle a bit to free it but even that could not dampen my spirits of having my own hot shower!
Well that is about it for now and I am going to get this belated post edited and shared so that I can get on with my day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
https://steemit.com/writing/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-1-7
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 8-14)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-8-14
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 15-21)
https://steemit.com/diy/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-15-21
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 22-28)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-22-28
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 29-35)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-29-35
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 36-42)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-36-42
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 43-49)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-43-49
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 50-56)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-50-56
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