We were only gone a day and a half (to Phoenix for a quick conference and spring training game), but what a change we came home to.
When we went out to drive to the property this morning, I first noticed that the mountainside had some gold shading on it.
Poppies!
We drove up to Horseshoe Canyon (at the end of our road) and couldn’t believe our eyes.
It’s spring! More pictures here.
Earlier in the week, I framed the shower and put in copper piping, while Brad worked on getting water run into the house.
Brad and I worked on plumbing Friday, putting in a new pipe to take water from the water tank over the top of the container and into the battery house, where the pressure pump will be. It was the first time we cut through a roof, which is something that has been making me nervous, but it went well.
Then, we had a picnic lunch under the cool of one our oak trees (yes, it’s finally getting warm!), before heading over to the farm for Friday harvest.
Friday is harvest day at the farm, something I hadn’t experienced yet. (Brad went without me last week while I was traveling.) The basic drill is that we get there after lunch and start harvesting, which entails cutting things like lettuce, greens, and herbs and digging up potatoes and other root vegetables. Then everything gets put in plastic bins and taken in to be washed, which is a big production in and of itself. Then everything goes into plastic bags and gets labeled for sale at the Saturday farm stand.
So far the marketing efforts we’ve been doing for the farm seem to be going well. This week we made a new sign for the farm stand, as well as continuing to work on the web site, email blasts, etc. The word is definitely getting out.
I helped paint the cold box for the farm stand, which is a large trailer-mounted box that all the veggies are kept in. I also had a new experience of gathering eggs. Fortunately, I had two little kids to help show me what to do! At one point, one of the chickens flew up and landed on my upper back, causing me to shriek in surprise. The six-year-old girl assured me that had never happened before. We later joked that the chickens could probably smell my fear. :) I also helped label and alphabetize many jars of herbs, teas, and supplements that we’re selling. Happy work for someone as compulsively organized as me.
The evening ended with a great meal of salad and pizza with lots of fresh veggies and yummy cheese that Jerry made. He is quite the cook and appreciates good food, much like we do.
After two weeks of travel, I am very thankful to be home now.
The electrical is done. Yay! And we’ve moved on to plumbing. Brad dug this ditch yesterday and is off getting more supplies as I write this.
I got our new property assessment this week. The value of the land has gone up; the value of the improvements has gone down. Hmmm….doesn’t seem that way to me. They had previously valued the improvements (the house) as 100% complete — how I wish that were true. :) Thankfully, our property taxes are so low that it doesn’t really matter.
In other news, the cottonwood we moved seems to be thriving. It is actually getting new leaves, despite the fact that it was been quite cold this week. We’ve had a lot of rain this month though, which bodes well. Spring can’t be far away, and I am ready for it!
I’ve been doing a lot of electrical work the last few days…so much that even I’m wondering if I’m qualified to do this! :) Seriously, electrical is serious stuff.
Pulling the Romex (the big yellow cables with electrical wires inside) through the ceiling and walls required no particular skill.
After that, I started making pigtails, wiring electrical sockets and switches. Wiring these was not too difficult and was actually fun to do once I got the hang of it.
We will have something like 60 outlets. I think it will be the first house I’ve ever lived in that has enough outlets and network ports.
Then, today, I got to start hooking the outlets into the wiring coming out of the walls. This was not only difficult, but seemed like serious stuff. You have to strip all the Romex coming out of the wall and then connect the similar colors (e.g. the black wires from all three wires) into a push-in wire connector. These are new things that you use instead of wire nuts. They are much more reliable, because once a wire goes in, it can’t come out. However, it is very difficult to get all those wires into their little tiny holes. And God help us when we have to stuff all this into the socket boxes!
After I got a half dozen or so of these wired up, Brad said he wanted to test them. Prior to this, we didn’t have any electricity “live.” I was not eager to to this. Since we haven’t pulled the cable from the battery house to the house yet, Brad had to rig up a power cable into the main power box, where he turned on the breaker for the first circuit I wired. Then we went to plug the tester in. The moment of truth… Success! Yay!
We spent the day today doing electrical. I mounted the electrical boxes (the blue things in the pictures below) for the lights onto 2x4s, which I then mounted between the i-joists in the ceiling.
It was fun, and even Brad remarked that my mood was much better. :)
Brad is running wire all over the house, including many network cables. As you might guess, in addition to wireless, we will have many network connections all over the house. It is a great deal of fun to put stuff wherever we want it and to think about what it will all be like when it is done.
I know we haven’t written much lately, but we are still here, moving ahead.
It is the time of year when I am doing a fair amount of travel for work (CA, TX, CA again, WA, etc.), which also means I have a lot of work to be doing in the office getting ready for various conferences, meetings, and workshops. (I am duping and printing CDs as I write this.) I have not been working much on the house the last couple weeks. As a result, I am a bit sullen and cranky, but it is good at least to be bringing in some money.
Brad has been working on electrical, pulling wires and putting in outlets and switches. He is finding it to be a bit tedious and not quite as gratifying as, say, stucco’ing, but it must be done. Next will be plumbing. Then some more really fun stuff…dry wall, paint, plaster, and tongue and groove plank ceilings.
We also have one other new project in our lives (because we have so much free time on our hands :). We are doing some work with a small local farm here.
My interest in this started when I read the book Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe. It is a remarkable book about the dissonance between the world most of us want to live in and the lives we actually live. The truth is that most of the decisions we make in our lives don’t support a sustainable clean planet and a just society for all of its people. The book goes way beyond sustainable food choices to deal with social issues like land reform, world hunger, economics, labor markets, and much more. Lappe’s overarching theme is that the small choices we make in our everyday lives affect all these parts of our society. The book is also part travel journal with the storyline following Lappe’s journey around the world with her daughter to look at these issues by talking with a variety of interesting people.
Anyway, some of the discussions in the book about things like organic growing, small farms, sustainable food choices, and community involvement made me think more about the small local farm here that we bought produce from last year. At the end of the last growing season, we had heard the couple from this farm say that they were having some challenges. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to get involved somehow. And while I know nothing about farming, I am a good marketer and small business person, so after much deliberation, I asked them if we might lend a hand.
Their response was amazing: YES! “We are thrilled for community involvement at any level individuals are willing to contribute. Our hopes are that our community would consider this their own local farm and would invest in it and help it prosper.”
Since then we’ve met several times and are hard at work on moving ahead with things. It’s loads of fun and like other things here, it is making us look at the world in some new ways.
Despite two snowfalls, weeks of below-freezing nighttime temperatures, and no irrigation for over a month, our garden has been thriving.
Today, I cut down all the greens and turned them over to get ready for spring.
We also tackled another project I’ve been wanting to do. You might remember that we built the beds with railroad ties as borders (railroad ties that Brad had gone to a fair bit of trouble to get). Later, I heard from a couple people that railroad ties are treated with nasty chemicals. I tried to think they were overreacting. Then I heard a show on “You Bet Your Garden” — not a particularly radical show — in which the host said he would never, ever use railroad ties for anything. He went on and on.
OK, so maybe we’d need to get rid of them.
I dreaded telling Brad, but predictably he said it was no big deal. So we got some redwood planks, and today put them in, along with a little sitting bench since we sometimes have lunch in the greenhouse.
I’m already starting to think about what we’ll plant for spring.
It’s been an interesting experience to have been immersed in our home building from design through actual construction (and, one day, living in it). For anyone in a business, I think that doing a variety of jobs throughout the enterprise is a great way to gain expertise, regardless of what job you want to do ultimately.
One example that has been interesting is our arched doorways. In the design phase, we really wanted to carry through some eclectic Moroccan-type design elements. The arched doorways were one easy and attractive way to do this. At the time, I didn’t really think of what would be involved in making them. (Brad may have; for me, everything was such an unknown that I didn’t single this out as different since I really didn’t know how to do anything.)
Of course, building them was another whole story. Just laying them out was challenging. Then stucco’ing them took a lot longer. And throughout, the risk loomed of messing them up and having them look horrible. (We have told ourselves on many occasions that there is nothing that can’t be ripped out and done again.)
Now that the one doorway is done though, it really looks great. I’m so glad we did it and am even looking forward to doing more. And I know that every one we do will be a little easier and a little better.
Today, days and days of rain and wind culminated in snow in the mountains, and later in the day, a wild fit of snow flurries at our house.
We worked inside and built our first indoor arched doorway.
To start, Brad drew the arch shape onto 1/4″ plywood (he’s getting very good at this) and then cut it with a jigsaw.
Then we ripped a couple 2x4s to be 1/2″ less than normal. This was so we could use them as framing inside, and when the two pieces of plywood were attached, the whole thing would be the same width as a 2×4.
Then we screwed the plywood down to the framing…
and attached it to the doorway framing.
It looks fabulous.
We have at least one more arch to make for Tumbleweed (or maybe more??) and many in the main house. I’m looking forward to finishing these with drywall, paint or clay, some tile accents, and who knows what else!
As we’ve talked to and shown various people around here the work we’re doing, a frequently asked question is “What makes you qualified to do this?”
Hmmm. Interesting question. I sometimes explain that Brad used to do construction. And while that has been very helpful in some areas, the reality is that much of what we’re doing is new to both of us.
So the answer is that we are bold and think we can do it.
My general feeling is that traditional education in many professions is less valuable than good common sense and hard work. To me, this is no different. We do a lot of research and try to think things out well in advance, but at some point you just plunge ahead and try it. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. If you work hard and smart, things generally work out.
A couple people have agreed with this saying that really anyone could build a house; you just need to want to do it and then to do the work. Both people who shared this perspective with us were professional contractors.